Time does go

I was watching a television program the other night, and a character looked at a picture and said, "Where does the time go?" An employee said, "Time doesn't go anywhere. It's just there."

I beg to differ. Time seems to have gone away rather rapidly

I don't remember things the way I once did. I never had a photographic memory or anything close, but once I wrote something, it stuck. I could remember things in amazingly great detail, so that when I wrote them, I was spot on. It was about my only talent as a writer all those years in journalism.

Now? I'm fairly certain my name is Billy. Fairly certain. Though I now answer to other names, as well, just in case.

But thinking about those statements, I began to think to my youth, and I remembered my summer of 1968. Hot. Dry, I remembered. Assassinations of a Kennedy and a King. Riots. Tough, tough times.

But baseball, I remembered. Joy, I remembered. It was in some ways the best summer of my life.

The summer played out to the tunes of Creedence and B.J. Thomas, like guides I would never truly have again musically. Laying in bed with the cool night country breeze (empowered by a huge window fan that sucked in wind like something they would use to produce a tornado for a movie), Green River came flowing in from WLS Chicago and I was well.

My crew included Stanley, a crazy-funny kid who played center field like a charging defensive lineman, which he most surely was. He was flanked by Dennis in left and Lynn in right. David played first. Randy played second, though he was left-handed. He was also our No. 2 pitcher. Sonny was at short. Terry was at third. I was the catcher.

And Rickey was our main pitcher. He went 10-0 that season as we went 18-0. He had an excellent curve that could be thrown three-quarters or completely over-hand, a good fastball and he could change speeds on it. He was so effective that Dennis and Stanley occasionally would whistle in the outfield that old Hank Williams tune, "I'm so lonesome I could cry."

We made a habit that summer of getting behind in games and coming storming back to win. We did that about half the time, as I recall. But we won them all. I was the one who asked Rickey and Randy, who lived in a couple of towns over from my little burg outside Meridian, Miss., to come play with us. They never had before. They capped it off by being the pitchers we needed.

Stephen King says in the short story Stand By Me that the greatest friendships we will ever have have are those we had when we were 12. I would amend that to say those I had at 14.

The first book I wrote was about that summer. I still have it somewhere, written in terrible long-hand and not nearly good enough to ever show anyone. I called it Looking Out My Backdoor after the CCR song.

John Fogerty sang some mystery lyrics, "Looking out my back door.
There's a giant doing cartwheels,
A statue wearing high heels.
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
A dinosaur Victrola listening to Buck Owens."

Like much of life at the time, I had no idea what he was singing about, but I knew that captured that summer.

We decided at the end of the summer we have a reunion each year to celebrate what we had accomplished. Three of us met the following summer. We never did that again. Oh, we played together for years afterwards, but it was never exactly like that.

Today, an amazing (to me) 45 years later, I haven't seen any of the guys since 1991, the year I came to Louisiana. Time really does go. A month or so ago, I discovered the guy I was closest to on the team, Rickey, has been charged with having sex with a minor and fired despite being a very, very successful coach. I was unquestionably in anguish while reading a story about this. Others have faced illnesses. As far as I know, they are all alive, though. WE are all alive.

The Bible says of time, "[ There’s a Right Time for Everything ] There’s an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth: A right time for birth and another for death, A right time to plant and another to reap, A right time to kill and another to heal..."

He grants us all our joys, extends all his knowledge and wisdom, and walks with us down increasingly dusty corridors. He, outside of time, enters into our time and our lives. I suspect he laughed along in the summer of 1968.

Time does go; oh, how it does go. It floats, it soars, it moves silently and it roars.

And it's gone. Never ever to be replaced in its exact manner.