Suddenly, time shifts into high gear

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

Back in 1982, when my husband and I were in our 30s and our kids were actually children, not the adults they are now, for Christmas we bought them ColecoVision, a video game player that was a big deal back then but would never pass muster by today’s standards. It was a large, clunky thing (there was no streaming in 1982); it had to be connected to a TV. It used a separate cartridge for each of its games. And it took time to warm up.

But once it was working?

It was a thing of beauty.

On no-school days when the kids were home, we all played Mario Bros., a still popular game, which was my son’s favorite. We also played a Smurf game my older daughter loved, which involved blue creatures jumping over fences.

Both of these games were fun.

My favorite, however, was Carnival, maybe because its background music, “Over the Waves,” was the song that played on every carousel I rode when I was a child. Memory had attached it to the best of times: Summer. Paragon Park. Ice cream. Childhood.

My husband and I played Carnival at night when the kids were asleep. I’d beg and unless the Bruins were playing, he’d always say yes. The game was essentially an amusement park ripoff, retrofitted for TV. Instead of a brick-and-mortar shooting gallery, it had a video of a shooting gallery. Instead of a fake shotgun with fake bullets to “shoot” fake ducks, rabbits, and bears, it used a joy stick to “shoot” fake ducks, rabbits, and bears. And instead of handing out stuffed animals as prizes, this game awarded points.

The ducks got me addicted. They didn’t seem unbeatable at first. They marched across the screen right along with the rabbits and bears. They weren’t any slower. They weren’t any faster. And they seemed every bit as vulnerable. I clicked the joystick and they didn’t have a magic shield protecting them. I clicked and they vanished.

But as the game advanced, the ducks became the creatures to beat. Left to right they poured onto the TV, more and more of them, faster and faster, like an invading army. Row after row they filled the screen. I worked that joy stick. But there was no stopping them. Night after night, despite my best efforts, they won.

One day, ColecoVision stopped working. After a while, it and its games got thrown away. That’s the only reason I stopped playing Carnival. But I never really stopped thinking about it. Those ducks have been in my head for years.

It’s the way they moseyed across the screen that has stuck with me. They moseyed as if they had all the time in the world.

Until sometime in the middle of the game when they suddenly shifted gears.

Time is like those ducks. In the beginning, time moseys. It’s so slow that sometimes you tell it to hurry up. It’s so slow that sometimes you wish whole days away. But eventually it picks up speed. It saunters, strides, trots, sprints, runs until the days are going so fast they bump into one another.

The ways we measure our lives, by days, months, years? It’s not a true measure. There is so much more to time. In another dimension, I suspect there is a force like gravity that pulls time along and that pulls a little harder the older you get. You don’t see this on any clock or calendar. You can’t see how much shorter September to December is when you’re 50 than when you were 10.

But it is.

The ducks kept coming and I couldn’t stop them. That’s what has always bothered me.

Time plays the same game. It marches on and all you can do is hang on. Because, as much as you want to press pause, no one has figured out a way to slow down, never mind stop, time.