Thoughts From A Journal Of My Seventieth Year By Dave Donelson: March Of Time

Writer Dave Donelson left his successful business career in 1999 to become a full-time freelance writer. In 2020 he both completed a memoir of his life growing up (entitled Fathers: A Memoir) and began a daily journal where he posts his thoughts, observations, and insights each day. Titled “The Journal of My Seventieth Year: A Memoir In Real Time,” the first volume of this daily diary is now available for purchase on Amazon.

We are delighted to share with agebuzz readers select individual posts from Dave’s journal, as well as his photography that accompanies the journal entries. Below is his latest selection for us.

March Of Time, Sunday, September 6, 2020

Inexorable time mocks our futile attempts to shape the world to suit our pleasures. I build a new door for the garden shed, a strong, good piece of work that fits the door frame perfectly. Then time puts its mouth to it and slowly sucks the moisture from the wood until, a month later, the boards shrink just enough to let light shine through the once-tight seams and the latch has moved a hair’s breadth so that it doesn’t latch properly.

We battle time knowing that it will win. Our yard features several outcroppings of the great bedrock that lays beneath the grass. The exposed rock strikingly offsets the green of the lawn and shrubbery and provides a dramatic contrast of textures with the colorful flower beds. But time asserts its own sensibility and ever so slowly covers the rock with a blanket of tight-clinging lichens and moss. Over the years, sedum takes shallow root in the moss, dies, and makes a thin soil where other weeds can sprout. The rock’s gray face turns brown and green until it blends into the landscape. Once every few years, we scrape away time’s work to expose the bedrock’s raw beauty again, but our efforts merely win today’s battle; tomorrow’s war will be won by time.

I will lose my war with time, too. I eat right, exercise, avoid destructive alcohol and tobacco, apply sunscreen, sleep as well as I can, get my flu shot every year, and try to live a stress-free life. I know these things are naught but feeble pebbles flung at the steel armor of time’s advancing army. I had surgery to remove the cataracts in my eyes, but they still become a tiny bit cloudier every day. My heart was repaired in a four-hour operation seven years ago, but I lose a bit of energy month by month.

I will continue to make the doors and scrape clean the rock outcroppings and tend to my aging body, but I know I cannot subdue the march of time.