This is Mia's 1975...

And that is a thought that both excites and chills me. You see, I can remember some moments from 1975; I was three years old, the age Mia is too quickly approaching. I can recall who I thought my parents were then (they were so tall and capable and lived to care for me, if I am correct). I can even remember trying to see what my parents were doing at the kitchen table, when they played cards with the Millers (who I thought were visiting to see me).

Time has been sprinting since Mia was born and watching it run as she grows makes me pensive about parenting. I get it now, how those old bastards I used to know who had loud, stinky children felt. They had kids and I didn't; they were forced every day to live differently because they lived for someone else. They were forced to see themselves in time the way only people who live with kids can. The world is faster than I knew it in 2003, and certainly so much more so than it was to me in 1975. Summer used to last forever, while now it is only August that has that distinction.

Here's a poem by Floyd Skloot that seems true to me, at least in its dealings with how living with children effects your view of time. Who knew I'd ever come to see life in a similar way as a poet named Floyd? :o)

Kansas, 1973

My daughter nestled in a plastic seat
is nodding beside me as though in full
agreement with the logic of her dream.
I am glad for her sake the road is straight.
But the dark shimmer of a summer road
where hope and disappointment repeat
themselves all across Kansas like a dull
chorus makes the westward journey seem
itself a dream. She breathes in one great
gulp, taking deep the blazing air, and stops
my heart until she sighs the breath away.
The sun is stuck directly overhead.

I thought it would never end. The drive,
the heat, my child beside me, the bright day
itself, that fathering time in my life.
We were going nowhere and never would,
as in a dream, or in the space between
time and memory. I saw nothing but sky
beyond the horizon of still treetops
and nothing changing down the road ahead.