Author's note: In keeping with my plan to check out on my birthday for the sake of balance, I have survived another and look forward to, at a minimum, 364 more days on this planet. This one, for some reason, created some internal turmoil. Why? Who knows? But I still carry the lessons of the Appalachian Trail: one foot in front of the other, hike your own hike, enjoy the journey.
Time is a witness that never takes the stand. It leaves evidence everywhere and answers no questions.
Most days I do not notice it, and that is the strange mercy of the thing. You can go weeks, whole seasons, without once feeling the current you are standing in. Outside my windows the Bay freezes and thaws. The light over Warren hardens to white in January and stretches long and gold by July. The mill I live in, the old American Tourister factory where they once advertised suitcases tough enough to survive a gorilla, still stands as though nothing has ever moved through it. You forget. You are meant to forget. A man who felt every second drain away would never get anything done.
Then something reminds you. For me it was a number: seventy.
The Psalmist got there first. The days of our years are threescore years and ten. He wrote that a very long time ago, and the arithmetic has not improved much since. I read it as a younger man the way you read a weather report for a city you will never visit. Interesting. Not mine. Seventy was a country other people lived in, older people, people who moved slowly and told the same stories twice. I had shifts to work and a bay to fish and a life that still felt like it was being assembled.
Now I hold the passport.
I spent twenty years learning to read evidence. Narcotics, the Investigative Services Division, a task force with the FBI and DEA where we built cases the way you build anything that has to hold, one verified piece at a time. You learn not to trust the story people tell you. You learn to trust the marks left behind. Time works the same way. It never explains itself, but it leaves marks, and if you have the eye you can read them.
The evidence is not hard to find. It is in the knees on the stairs. It is in the names. I can stand at a window and count, without trying, the people I once could have called who would no longer answer. Partners. Friends. A few men I arrested. A few I would rather not have outlived. That is the part nobody warns you about. Time does not only take from you. It leaves you standing, which is its own peculiar sentence, holding a growing list of the departed and a shrinking list of the people who remember the same things you do.
I have walked long stretches of the Appalachian Trail, and the trail taught me something the calendar never could. You follow white blazes painted on the trees, one to the next, and you cannot see far ahead. A bend, a rise, and the future closes off. But you can turn around. You can look back down the ridge you just climbed and see, laid out plain, every hard step that got you there. That is time exactly. We are blind going forward and clear-eyed looking back, forever surprised by what is coming and never surprised by what has already come.
There are two boys who have rearranged all of this for me. My grandsons, Levi and Wyatt. To them a week is an eternity, and a summer has no end, because they have gathered so few of them that each one fills the whole sky. I remember measuring time that way. I remember when August was a continent. Watching them, I understand that the years did not speed up. I simply acquired more of them to measure against, and each new one became a smaller fraction of the whole. The clock never changed. My arithmetic did.
I have spent a good part of my later life turning over questions a younger cop would have called a waste of a good afternoon. What consciousness is. Whether the self that woke this morning is truly the one that went to sleep, or just a well briefed replacement who inherited the files. Whether the soul keeps its own clock. I have no verdict. I am not certain the question is the kind that returns one. But I have come to suspect that the present moment, the thin bright line we are always standing on, is the only real estate any of us ever actually owns. The past is testimony. The future is speculation. Now is the only thing admitted into evidence.
Seventy did not frighten me. It did something quieter and harder to shake. It called me to account. It is a milestone with the number filed off and a mirror set in its place, and when you look you can no longer pretend the road ahead runs on forever. There is more in the rearview mirror than the windshield. You have some of it. You do not know how much. Neither did you at thirty, but at thirty the ignorance was a comfort, and now it is a fact you handle with both hands.
I do not intend to spend what is left mourning what is gone. That is a poor use of daylight, and I have watched too many people do it. The suitcase factory outside my door was built to make things that survived hard travel, and then the trade moved on and the work stopped, and the building did not fall down feeling sorry for itself. It became something else. People live in it now. I am one of them. There is a lesson in a place that outlives its purpose and finds another.
The days of our years are threescore and ten. Mine are here. I know the number now, the way you finally know a witness you spent years trying to get to talk. It will not tell me how the story ends. It never does. But it has finally told me the truth I kept refusing to write down: that the time was always passing, that it was always this brief, and that noticing it, even late, even at seventy, is not the end of anything.
It is just the first honest look at the ledger.
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