I haven’t finished my Christmas shopping yet.

This fact got me thinking a little bit about time this morning.

It’s 5:05 in the morning.

See…I’m obsessing over time already.

I have two days until Christmas.  Two days is supposedly 48 hours.  A day is 24 hours…and if I multiply it by two, it “maths out” to be 48.

But I wasted some of it sleeping last night…and, hopefully, I’ll waste some of my time sleeping again in the next couple of days.

So, what was 48 hours on paper suddenly becomes something like 32 hours.

And then if subtract the time I’m at work delivering packages for all the people who have their acts together, I have to observe that I have even less time to “do the deed”.

I am paying attention to time these days.

It didn’t used to be like this.

Time used to be an enemy, to be sure, but it wasn’t ever-present in my consciousness.

When I was a child…a younger child…time moved slowly.

Pronouncements made about future plans could have been sealed in a time capsule…to be opened next week and then resealed.

The future was not a binding contract.  It was like a cloud when I was a child.

When I said, at the age of five, that I was going to wait until I was like…23 years old to marry, it was like saying that it would never happen…that was too far in the future.

Two days until Christmas was like being stuck in some kind of cruel time-warp when I was a child.

Liquids floated through space as if I was gravityless in a pre-space shuttle.

Babies were born over the course of years instead of days.

The ticking of the clock sounded like the “Little Drummer Boy” on codeine.

Time didn’t stand still…but it surely slowed down.

Einstein has his E=MC2.  That’s a famous formula.  He got a lot of attention for that one.

I have my Christmas/Time Correlation.

In the Christmas/Time Correlation, the results of the formula change depending on the age of the participant.

Since age is pretty consistent on paper, but variable in execution, I would have to say that maybe “maturity” might be a better measure… for the sake of science.  It’s more descriptive…maybe it’s a better way to set it all up for a viable conclusion.

Nah, maturity is a ghost, too.  Who knows what that means? We’re all just a bunch of “children in disguise” as my friend, Garrett, says in one of his songs.

Anyway, I’m feeling the pinch. Two days is a short and compressed time for me to take care of my “bidneth”. Time has accelerated.  I have crossed the threshold at some point and I am on the other end of the whip, swinging through time at sub-sonic speed, grabbing onto whatever I can to try and slow the wheel down.

Maybe. Maybe that’s what’s going on.

A child is moving through molasses. Time is the enemy from a different perspective.  Time is the obstacle to hurdle to reach the prize.

I remember getting up early Christmas day when we lived in California.

We lived in “Silicon Valley” before the discovery of Silicone…I mean “Silicon”.

I got up early, went out to the tree…and opened the present that I’d wanted to open since it had first made its appearance under the tree a couple of days earlier.

It was!

It was!

It was a yellow plastic Batman utility belt, with a Bat spy camera, a Batarang, and a plastic grappling hook with a short length of “Bat rope” that I could use to scale things that weren’t too high off the ground.  It had a number of other “Bat things” on it, but I can’t remember what they were.

I think that I was about 5 years old….maybe 6?

I WAS JACKED!!!  IT WAS!!!

Our friend, May David, was sleeping in the guest room that joined the living room.  It had a bifold door that we closed while she was sleeping on the hideabed.

“Peter…Peter…Peter, is that you?” she whispered.

“Yes”.

“What are you doing?”

…………………………………………………………………………………….”nothing”.

“Peter, it’s 3 in the morning.  You need to go back to sleep…it’s not time to open presents yet.”

“ok”, I whispered…then I made the long walk back down the hall to my little bed.

That was a long night….waiting for morning and my new Batman utility belt.

Every Christmas night is a long one for a child.

Every Christmas seems to get more compressed for an adult.

We’re all just caught up in the Christmas/Time Correlation.

I will go out on a limb and commit to that as being my explanation for what happens at Christmas.

I will commit to that being what happens at Christmas…”present-wise”.