Stopping Time
“There are those days which seem a taking in of breath, which held, suspends the whole world in its waiting.”
Ray Bradbury
—Farewell Summer
It might have been the rhythm of the cicadas, so steady and dependable. Or, perhaps it was the warmth of the breeze that touched my cheek as I transported pots of bright-colored mums from my garden wagon to our front porch. Or maybe it was the joy of watching, for the first time this school year, our high school’s cross-country team—graceful and swift as a herd of gazelles—sweep past the steps where I stood. Of course, the likelihood is that the answer to the question about why I loved a Midwest September was “all of the above.”
How easy it was to imagine myself in Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, the fictional setting for his coming-of-age stories; stories which so beautifully captured his real-life memories of dog days and summertime’s farewell in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. These were indeed the days when summer and fall crossed paths, staunching—if only for a moment—the flow from one season to the next. It’s the in-between time! sang the inner voice I recognized as my own. But it wasn’t until one evening, several days later, after I had plopped on the family room sofa and opened my MacBook, that a new question overtook my conscious mind: As a writer, and as a mother, wasn’t I in a kind of liminal space, as well?
The sure evidence that the afternoon I’d spent in sensory bliss had cracked open an emotional door came when I clicked on “calendar” and began scrolling through the next month’s events. There, in the empty square that was marked October 24, was a notation I’d typed nearly a year ago: “BOOK LAUNCH DAY!” Long time coming, I heard my interior voice say. Burrowing deeper into the sofa’s oversized cushions, I felt suddenly grateful to be home alone, free to let my thoughts wander, thoughts that soon drifted between the “what had once been” and the “yet to come.”
Remember the day when you blubbered to a stranger about your lifelong dream to tell stories rather than listen to the ones others told you? Your dream to become a writer? It had been a cool autumn day with an edge to it in 2016—three years before I retired from a longtime career as a clinical psychologist—when I’d sought advice from an author and therapist who led creative writing workshops. They were small-group affairs aimed at newbies like me. “So maybe it’s time?” she’d asked, as I sat pulling tissues from a box near her desk. Those turned out to be two years well spent, declared the Terry who lived in my head. They gave you the confidence to risk writing Radio Mom.
A memory of a conversation I’d had weeks before came to mind then. “Time for the next book?” a former colleague had asked, her naïveté about the process of my new passion showing.
“My God, Radio Mom isn’t even in my hands yet!” I answered. “And I’m still in the throes of preparing for Grace’s upcoming wedding.” I laughed at this point, even though being so misunderstood was difficult. In a more serious tone, I added, “You know, I feel that even though she’s a full-fledged adult who’s been on her own for years, I’m having to let go of my baby.”
My friend rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, and while simultaneously giving birth to another,” I replied, joining the two events together for her edification—and my own.
Now, as the smell of cedar burning in the firepit in my neighbor’s backyard wafted through the screens, I suddenly realized that although this colleague and I had talked for a long while, I’d never really answered her question, at least not in a straightforward way. I hadn’t addressed, for example, how as thrilled as I was to realize my “second act” aspiration to publish my memoir, I had no real clue about which direction my internal compass was now pointing—which path my writing would take at this point.
Are you trying to repress the idea? Worried that you might not find your way forward? pressed my interior voice. I wasn’t sure, but even if this had been the case, weren’t these emotions, like so many others, to be expected when one was standing in the place where one thing ends and another is about to begin? Wasn’t it natural to feel a host of sensations and have a lot of insights when occupying “the space-in-between?”
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long for what seemed like confirmation of this theory. The very next night, I’d had a vivid dream in which I watched a gleeful, middle-school-aged Grace, disappear through the door of an airplane as it readied to roar down a runway—alone. “Wait!” I’d screamed, realizing that not only could I not reach my child, but that she had been carrying only a flimsy laundry bag and had on no shoes. Panicked that she was not only gone but unprepared for the rigors and surprised by her unspecified destination, I grew hoarse as I shouted, “Somebody needs to stop that plane!”
As the dream continued and the jet took off, my stomach cramped with panic. Finland? South America? Hadn’t Grace mentioned something about an island in the Caribbean recently? Caught up in the fiction I’d created, I had then searched for a payphone (yes, a payphone!), hoping to reach the mother of Grace’s childhood friend—a woman in “real life” who, like a human GPS, had been the one who could be counted on to know what every one of our kids was “up to,” and where they could be found. “Definitely Finland,” Neighbor-Mom had reported when I was finally able to track her down. “She probably just threw her shoes in the bag before she ran to the tarmac. Don’t worry. She’ll be fine.” At that point, I awoke abruptly, with a kink in my back and an ache in my gut.
This morning, as a breeze rustles through the silver maple that towers over the backyard, I remain convinced that rather than having been a dream about a not-ready-for-take-off daughter, this was a sleep-induced nudge from my unconscious; a communique about my own not-quite-ready for her lift off. But am I concerned that I will somehow become stuck in this spot, unable to celebrate my girl’s glide into the next chapter of her life? Or that I won’t be able to map out my own next steps—trusting that eventually, I’ll recognize what “true north” means to me?
Actually, by the time I’d finished my morning coffee, I understood that I wasn’t really worried at all. I reminded myself that this yearning to hold tight to the ephemeral, to imagine that I have control where I have none, was, of course, a predictable response to change; another feature of the human condition.
And as for today? With surprise, I realized that the only fretting I expect to do is if there’s a delay in being able to plunk myself down in our deck’s wicker chair. As I listen to the “tree crickets” from my seat at ringside, I will strive to capture long and concentrated breaths, and thus begin to pay homage to these days that Bradbury so eloquently wrote about: Days that have the power to stop time.
