Yesterday's over our shoulder, we can't look back for too long

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

``I can't believe it,'' my dentist said. I was in the chair. He was standing over me. He looked stunned. He looked like a man who had just had his car stolen.

No it wasn't the sight of my migrating teeth (his phrase, not mine) that stunned him, but the sight of my daughter and her infant son.

``She was just in high school,'' he said. ``How can she be married? How can she have a baby? How old is she?''

``Twenty-seven,'' I told him.

``Twenty-seven,'' he repeated, still obviously rattled.

I know the feeling.

Xena - once my little cousin - was only yesterday standing at the candy bowl, stuffing M&Ms into her mouth, into her hands, into a little baggie. Then she was 10 and visiting for the summer. And shortly thereafter I drove to her house, hid behind a door and surprised her on her 13th birthday. So how can she be turning 18 next week?

Adrienne Parker just graduated from Northeastern University. Adrienne is Emily Parker's little sister. Last thing I knew she wasn't even allowed to walk to the L'il White Store by herself. But there she was last week at her parents' house, the celebrated graduate.

The child she used to be was nowhere to be found - except in the eyes of those of us who remember her that way.

This is what they don't tell you in algebra or geometry. This is what you don't learn even in simple addition. You can divide time into days and months and weeks and years. You can keep calendars and journals. You can split a second into microseconds. You can record and compare and keep time and race against time and even waste time.

But none of it matters. Because the shortest distance between two points isn't a straight line at all - a minute, a year, 10 years, a lifetime, 10 lifetimes can all seem the same distance.

My godson, Connor, graduated from high school last night. He's 6 feet tall and a handsome boy. He used to fit in my arms, 18 years ago.

Or was it just a memory ago?

I have a picture taken of us that day. We are standing in the back yard - Connor, his two older brothers, his mother Beth, his father and Marilyn, his other godmother. I am holding him. He is lighter than my grandson is now.

``Come out back. We're going to take pictures,'' I hear Beth's mother say.

In real time, Connor is 18. But somewhere else, in my head, in my heart, he's an infant, still, and Beth's mother is alive and the twins, Connor's younger sisters, Kait and Emily, aren't even born.

This is what graduations evoke, and weddings, and birthdays and all the celebrations by which we mark our lives. Memories that thumb their nose at months and days and years.

My dentist was ambushed by time. A 27-year-old mother and an 8-week-old baby boy - how could this be? He knew my daughter when she was small. He hadn't seen her in a while. He didn't see a decade fly by.

It happens. It's a cliche. But it's a cliche that has provided the lyrics for a hundred songs. ``Sunrise, sunset.'' ``Turn around and they're tiny, turn around and they're grown.''

We shouldn't be startled by the obvious. But we see a woman instead of the girl we used to know. We see a young man instead of a boy. We see yesterday sitting right next to today, and we are alway stunned at the sight.