Schultz Party of Four

 

There are ten minutes a day, right before they fall asleep, when we read. There are ten minutes a day, just after a reasonable dinner has been prepared, when we dine. There are ten minutes a day, after they have awoke from their slumber but before the sun has awoke from his, that we come to the table for breakfast. And then there are ten minutes when I am not home, and a few more groups of ten after that. Ten minutes when they learn, and a little more. Ten minutes in the Starbucks drive-thru, then off to tens of minutes of work. There used to be ten minutes a night when I could find time to sit at the keyboard and pound out a memory, a funny story, or a lesson learned.

Tonight a kind friend asked for a bit of advice. I went searching on here, my posts of yore, for a particular book I knew I had mentioned in the past. I scrolled through pages of ten minute windows, and wondered where my ten minutes was spent tonight. And how I'll remember these ten minutes some day. The ten minutes I spent searching for Snow White's last corner of hair on that elusive puzzle piece, the ten minutes that it took for the doctor to remove two more moles, the ten minutes when Julia told me the whole story of how a boy in her class hurt her feelings when she lost the race, the ten minutes watching Carolyn warm up on the ice with such grace it took my breath away. I would like to put a few of those in my memory box, a digital memory box for the 21st century. I need to remember the someday me who will have a few minutes to spare some evening to remember what it was like when they were 5 and 7, and I was 31, and life was life in ten minute increments.