First floor, 1961: Ms. Kramer’s first grade class, I stared out the window. Not my best year, class-wise, I wanted to be anywhere but there. The passing of time made a snail’s pace warp factor 10: way beyond light speed.
  Ms. Krammer sent me to the office where I got a stern lecture on paying attention. But passing from the lower grade first floor, to middle grade second floor, all the way to the third floor: Mr. Bob’s 6th grade class: the temptation to stare out the window to pass time was hard to resist. By then the snail’s pace seemed, perhaps, warp factor 6 to the drag of time.
  By the time I hit high school I had passed the now sluggish snail, closing in on warp factor 1. A lot had happened; I had moved to my fav place in the universe: the Central Adirondacks, after I lost part of my foot to a lawnmower, after my mother died of cancer, after I had come close to dying stuck in -20 weather across a lake in the dark… a lake I couldn’t cross due to thin ice and my first adult love on the lake I came to call home yanked the heart out of my chest and gleefully put it into an emotional meat grinder. It was not the last time: but the first time is so damn hard to forget.
  Does it surprise you at all, dear reader, that after that I hated dating? I don’t know what I would have done if I had never met Millie almost 40 years ago.
  Has it really been almost 40 years?
  Yup.
 Time flies. Read more