
Today. MLK Day. Inauguration day, which I won’t capitalize.
Sometimes, as I coffeewalk through the cemetery part of my loop, I think about the aphorism “The days are long, but the years are short.” People say it about parenting, but I think it’s true in a broader sense too. I’m holding onto that now.
Look at this tombstone, for instance.
My grandfather Irving, who died when I was in my thirties, was born in 1912. So Henry Otterson here, whoever he was, overlapped with him by four years: born 1840, died 1916. And John, who must have been Henry’s father, lived from 1797 to 1867.
Three hopscotches from my own lifetime. Grampa, Henry, John. That’s all it takes, and suddenly we’re back in the 1700s.
Scary and comforting at the same time, somehow.
To me, it says: Four years is nothing. Forty years? The tombstone laughs. One more long-lived Otterson and it coulda transported us back nearly four hundred years, easy.
Things that seemed so timeless to me that I assumed their permanence – NATO, my right to vote as a white woman, the polio vaccine – are recent innovations. They flickered into existence a moment ago, relatively speaking. They may flicker out again. Which would suck, obviously.
On the other hand. Everything we’re facing now? A blip.
Two-plus centuries of bending the arc of history towards justice are just a hop, skip, and a jump here in the cemetery.
The days have felt long to everyone along the way, I’m sure. Full of heartbreak and fear and victory and courage and setbacks and progress, the high-stakes issues of their days seeming like they would echo forever down the corridors of history. And maybe they do, in ways we don’t necessarily hear anymore, even as we unknowingly see their impacts around us. But the years disappear, the past a blur that we call “long ago” because it receded so fast from our view.
The struggle to free all of us has been long, and it will be long. What happens every day will matter.
And still, the years will be short.
I can’t explain exactly what I mean, or why this helps me. I’m offering it anyway, in case it helps you.
Long or short, I’ll see you on the path through the next four years.
Onwards, friends. ❤️