4. Slow Crawl
If you ask me how long it took for me to get from zero to twenty-one, I will tell you it felt like about sixty years when I think of everything that happened during that time. Mayhap not from zero to say eight or nine, but once you're aware of what time is and how it operates, those years from eight or so until twenty-one seemed to last forever. I think that more or less stems from the fact that you're constantly being told you can't do this or that until you're older. "Older" becomes this mythical age that always seems like a distant blip on the horizon, and the anticipation is horrible. First you can't wait to get into high school; then you can't wait until you turn sixteen so you can drive a car; then it's turning eighteen and graduating high school; and the last frontier for me was turning twenty-one so I could legally go into a bar. I didn't go to collegeI saved that for my thirtiesbut I suppose graduating that could also be considered the final milestone. No one looks forward to turning thirty; as someone who's approaching the dark side of his thirties, I'm not necessarily looking forward to turning forty, either. Though as my old man is fond of saying, it beats the alternative. There are also microcosms between those milestones; remember how long it seemed to take for Christmas to come every year when you were a kid? Especially if you had asked for that one thing you wanted more than life itself (that for me one year was a Commodore 64; kids, you may visit your local museum or consult the internet to learn about the Commodore 64). And the closer Christmas got, the slower time crawled. That night before Christmas felt like the length of a day on Pluto. As horrible as that seemed at the time, it was infinitely more preferable than...