Old and New

I was wandering around the rural cemetery this morning, and this stone caught my eye, first because of the hand pointing out the words "AT REST", lest we fail to recognize that fact, and secondly because my name is Jennie, after my grandmother, Jennie Finley. I might be thinking more about "time" than about "old" and "new", but aren't they on the same continuum? Anyway, there I was, the "new" Jennie contemplating the story of a woman with the same name as me, who lived out her life more than a century before me….

I have been thinking a lot about the concept of time, how it moved so very, very slowly when I was five years old on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa Claus, and how, the older I am, the faster it seems to speed by.

My memories are affected by time, but not necessarily in a linear way. I can remember inconsequential moments from my childhood, but can't remember what I did with my phone. OilMan complains that it takes me "forever" to tell a story, and I insist that the length of time it takes to tell a story depends on establishing the proper setting. He just shakes his head and says I'm getting to be more and more like my mother….

Here is a wonderful quote about time from the author, Jess Walter, writing about his novel, Beautiful Ruins, which I just finished reading:

I think all novels are, in some way, about time….there's something in the way time moves through and around a novel, and through and around us when we are reading it, that is singular to books….Fiction has the power to slow time, to speed it up, to dilate it, to flash it forward and back, to make it as precise as today's date or as wispy as a distant memory.

The passage of time melds imagination and reality and experience. I am fascinated by the concept of time and memory. I know that consciously or not, I often rewrite things in my own memory so that after awhile, I'm sure that what I remember has very little to do with what really happened....sounds like it might make a good story…although I have a feeling it's been done before.

Thanks to skeena for hosting again this week