Time lapse

Christmas Eve and I’m tempted to do a historical photoanalysis to figure out the stats on how often Caleb and I have missed going to church and/or Grandma’s house for Christmas. 

We missed the last two days of school before break due to sickliness. I’ve only been up and about the last couple of days, and Caleb was still bad enough that he fell asleep on the couch clutching the tissue box. 

It’s not the dreadful flu of last year, merely a cold.

I have no memory of ever staying home from school with a cold. I remember countless ear infections and the occasional stomach bug sending me home from elementary school, and I know I had colds in high school, I just don’t remember staying home from such things back then. Granted that pre-covid we all had much higher social acceptance of infectious disease, I’ve considered several theories as to why colds never kept me down.

1) I was so glowingly healthy from my mom’s nutritious cooking and the exercise I got from playing field hockey that I never got sick.

2) Alternately, I only got sick over school breaks.

3) Cold germs are worse now and produce more severe illness than they used to.

4) I’m old (indisputable, but this doesn’t explain the pathos of Caleb asleep on the couch snuggling the Kleenex).

5) As I went to school in the same school system K-12, in a small town, with essentially the same classmates surrounding me, by the time we were in middle school we had already shared all the germs and were therefore never waylaid by something new.

6) Living in Vermont, contrary to what fall foliage postcards would have you believe, is not actually idyllic. It’s always cold, so your nose is always running; and heating the house with a woodstove means your throat and lungs always hurt from inhaling smoke. So maybe when I got a cold, I simply didn’t notice the difference.

7) Everyone knows that the modern American brain has lost its attention span from three decades ago. Maybe my relative patience back then meant that a week of sickness barely registered in the memory bank, whereas now if I’m still sick twelve hours later I become convinced that I will indeed die of this cold.

Those of us who do make it to church tonight are being reminded to come early to navigate the construction zone out front, due to our church’s building project. 

The construction company broke ground a few weeks ago on our sorely-needed expansion. Our church leadership, in a brilliant demonstration of their understanding of human nature, has begun to email a weekly time-lapse video of each week’s construction progress. Last week I got the email when Jed and Maddie were over, so I played the time-lapse on the big tv and we all together oooh’d and aaaah’d.

Who doesn’t love a time lapse? 

Caleb, on the train to New York City, circa 2018:

I think it’s because we humans are bound by time, this delight we take in time-lapse videos (slo-mo too, to an extent). Things we’re waiting for in real time are so excruciatingly slow—whether the heavy equipment parked in front of the church door to do something already….or to get over an interminable seven-to-ten-day cold that is more than bad enough to keep you out of school.