Unplugged!: April 2011

LIFE AND LILACS

Time waits for no one to stop and smell the flowers

Ellen Goodman

The lilacs have gone by. I take note of this with an unexpected snap of sad regret as I take my morning commute from the kitchen to the driveway.

The flowers had made their annual appearance on the bushes that stand beside my back door. For two weeks, they had permeated the air with a seductive promise the way a perfume wafts into the atmosphere of a department store.

I had planned to take up their offer, to spend time in their company. But now the last of the blooms has turned a crusty deadhead shade of beige. And I had paid only the most transient of visits, enjoyed only a contact high, a small whiff of their possibilities.

This morning, it is the absence of lilacs that finally stops me in my tracks. I brake belatedly to pay the toll of attention to what is now missing. A year’s worth of lilacs, an entire life span of flowers.

I repeat the phrase in my mind: The lilacs have gone by. It is what gardeners say. But, in fact, the lilacs stayed in one place and I had gone by them, hurrying, on the way, on the move.

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Behind me in this small city garden there are irises in bloom now. The peonies are on the way, the ants already feasting the sweet sap off their buds. They will be followed by day lilies and black-eyed Susans, by asters and fall. I run down the perennial calendar and become nostalgic for the summer that, at this writing, has yet to officially begin.

The days are long, but lately my friends have been wistful about time, the common currency of their lives. They talk of spending too much time on what are dubbed essentials. Too many hours seem to be taken out of their week, as if the week were a paycheck, too much withheld before they get to some small luxury, a moment of discretionary spending.

At lunch last week, a woman not given to maudlin cost accounting had figured out on her actuarial table that she has probably 30 more chances to see the pink lady slippers in the woods. Thirty is a lot said the woman who is approaching 50 herself. But it is also, suddenly, finite.

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The other day, an economist who jet lags between cities and seasons, stopped to talk about the lupine he was leaving behind on his way to Singapore. Why couldn’t the geneticists manipulate the bloom dates for our convenience the way politicians move presidents’ birthdays around for the benefit of a long weekend? In his mockery, there was longing.

This morning, dangling out of my briefcase is a plastic bag of excess black-eyed Susans that I dug up in a rush last night. Flowers for a friend. On the phone last week, we talked about the sense of channel-surfing through life. Work, click, kids, click, parents, click, errands, click. With split-second timing it was possible to cover everything—but only if we stay on the surface.

What times we are living in, time deficient times in an era of high productivity and low sensibility.

What happens when life becomes a list, we asked each other? When even the pleasurable things become items to check off? What happens when we are getting through the days? What are we getting through and to? But, our thoughts were interrupted by cell phones.

Maybe this speed trap is not so clear in the taupe sameness of winter when one day stretches endlessly like another. But sometimes, standing in a garden, a season can seem as short as the lifespan of a day lily. Sometimes, you catch a glimpse of something in human nature that longs to spend time lavishly. To relish as well as to produce.

On a late spring morning, there is a wistful reminder in this natural datebook. How quickly things “go by.” Life and lilacs.