After an unfortunate encounter with a paper-cutter in which one of my thumbs didn’t fare so well, I sought a bandage. This led me on a reverie since the bandage I found was in a box that I’d brought home from my mother’s apartment. Mom was a practical woman and I’m sure she would’ve approved, although the item was selected in a moment of grief that still hasn’t completely dissipated. As my wife was binding my wound the thought recurred that my mother wouldn’t be needing these physical assuagements any longer. Like all of us, if cut she bled. She’s beyond that now. A person’s affects linger and contain pieces of their memories. This particular box was plastic and therefore reusable—which is precisely what Mom did. She taught me how to bandage myself and I’ve used that knowledge many times over the decades. It’s something I don’t need YouTube to figure out. Time is a gift.
When writing about recent times, I recently learned new vocabulary regarding decades. For example, the first two decades when I was culturally aware were the seventies and eighties. Together they’re known as the xennial period, named, presumably, after “generation X.” (I’m a very late boomer, as well as a late bloomer.) I found that fascinating. Then I was reading something that made reference to the “noughties.” This delightful word is the British term for “aughts” or “aughties”—the years between ’00 and ’09 of any given century. We hear plenty about the “twenties,” “thirties,” and so on, so I became curious about the correct term for the second decade of a century. Either “tens” or “teens” is acceptable, but it seems that in formal writing this should be transcribed by numbers. I guess teen ages are always difficult.
Our divisions of time demonstrate our preoccupation with both mortality and round numbers. More and more people are living the entire way through a century, from aughties through nineties. For most of us, however, we can, if things go well, use our birth decade as a rough guide. I’m not likely to make it through the fifties, but it isn’t impossible. If I do I guess I’ll need to upgrade my WordPress account because my daily posts will have used up my allotted memory by then. In the meantime, I do need to buy some new bandages for the time in between. When I do I’ll put them in a simple plastic box, and I will remember the gift of time I shared with my mother.
