80 Years In A Day

By Jeff Moore

If I live to be 80, yet called it a day, what times would be set to some of the events that were notable in my life?

I would have been born at 12:00 am…

I started walking at 12:18, and was speaking by 12:36.
I started kindergarten at 1:36.
My first guitar was given to me at 4:05.
My teen years, like most of ours, were hard. I started smoking at 4:12, and shed my last tears at 4:18.
I turned eighteen at 5:24, and graduated high school soon after, at 5:26.
I wrote my first song at 5:27, discovering a new way to cry.
I met my first love at 6:06, and made love for the first time at 6:09. She was gone, never to be seen again, by 6:30.
My 21st birthday came at 6:18, long after my first drink, around 4:30.
I met my wife at 6:51, and we were married at 7:00, on the dot.
My mother died at 7:53, having only barely made it to her own 50th birthday a week before. My day seemed shorter then.
I quit smoking at 8:46, as my first child was to be born at 8:47.
Her sister, my second miracle, followed at 9:33.
I finished my Master’s degree, a different kind of miracle, at 10:34.
Now it is 12:00pm. I am 40 years old at my noon.

Could this really be the noon of my day? I hope to live much longer than my ponderings here allow. I might be fortunate to make even 80 years though.

I look back over these musings and wonder at all of the moments left unpunctuated by a note. I think of all the time in between the notes I made, and how the significant things seemed to come more often earlier in my life.

Finally, I wonder how the second half of my day will unfold. Will I succumb to a winter’s life? Will my afternoon be dark, and my night cold? Or, will I live it as though it were a summer’s day? Will my life remain bright, long into the warm evening hours? I can only know in time.

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