Seasons of Love - RENT

Somewhere in Time...

A Message in Time

Time stops for no man... How I wish it would.  How I wish we could hold on to certain moments and NOT LET GO.  What a loving God we serve that in creating us, gave us the BEST kind of internal camera - Our memories!  Think about... How a certain song or smell can bring you back to a certain time in your life? Or even a taste of a familiar food - can bring a flood of memories coming through.... Thank God for creating our senses!

My mother is turning 70 next week... SEVENTY.  How did THAT happen?? When did that happen?  I'm SO glad it happened!  But you see, in my eyes - my mom is "ageless."  Mom's "don't age," they stay the same - they are simply, "Mom."  How does time go by so quickly?  Although I am 45, I feel the SAME as I did when I was 16 - only wiser. (At least I hope I am....).  Isn't it funny how "old" is always 15 years "older than you are?"  (And, as I already indicated, that doesn't pertain to our parents...)  I look at elderly people, and  I finally understand what they meant when they looked at us, shook their head and said, "If I only knew THEN what I know NOW."  Our bodies are just shells.  Or as the Bible puts it "temples."They house who we REALLY are.  As I grow older, I understand this more and more.

As a birthday present, I bought my mom tickets to go see Maya Angelou.  I didn't expect her to want to take ME with her, but I'm so glad she did.  Dr. Angelou spoke of "having an attitude of gratitude" How we should let "thank you fall off of our lips often."  She spoke of how at a time in her life, when she was a single African American parent, she was asked to play a role in the Musical "Porgy and Bess."  A role that would take her around the world to perform.  She asked her son if it would be okay with him if she did this.  He went to stay with a relative while she did the tour (her son  - I think she said, was eight years old at the time.)  When she returned from the trip, her son was angry with her.  She went through a depression and contemplated commiting suicide - holding her son's hand and jumping off the balcony of their apartment.  When she realized what a danger she was becoming to herself and to her son, she went to get help.  She ended up going to her voice coach's house, telling him how she felt.  After listening to her, he said "Take this yellow pad of paper." (She took it from him). He then said, "Now, write down that you are grateful you can "take" that pad of paper when there are people that don't even have hands to reach for things. Now, write down that you are grateful that you have fingers that you can write with on that yellow pad of paper... Now write down that you are grateful that you can spell... And then when you think about it - write down that you are grateful you can read..." And he went on and on until she realized how MUCH she was"grateful" FOR. She then admitted to us all, that from that point on ALL of her writings/poems have been done on "Yellow pads of paper." (I wrote this from jotted down notes I took during her presentation - so please remember it's based on notes "I wrote" on not a yellow pad of paper - but a small white one, and I probably am not doing her "justice" in how she presented it).

I have a clock hanging in my living room. I got it from The Cracker Barrel Store - A store I love because you can have lunch there and shop too! This store sells items that represent many different eras. I bought a clock a year ago.  The name of the clock is "A Message in Time."  What I love about it, is that you can put tiny pictures on the walls of the clock right where each number for an hour would be. (See above photo). I have filled it with pictures of my three children.  Two of my kids decided they wanted to record what would be the "chime." They decided that the perfect chime for the clock would be a verse from the song "Seasons of Love" (from the musical "Rent.") They decided they would sing the following verse:

"Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes... How many minutes are in a year?" 

Every time my clock chimes, I hear my children singing that verse.  No matter how old they become (as long as the clock works), frozen in time will be their child-like voices, taking me back to the moment they (innocently) recorded it.

So I guess what we need to do, is to remember how precious this gift called life is. How precious time is... And if necessary - get ourselves "a pad of yellow paper" if it helps you (as it did Dr. Angelou) remember what a gift our lives are, and in the words of Dr. Angelou - ""See in yourself something SO WORTHY that you will not only live a unique life - but that you will live one in which you thrive with passion and compassion AND style!"

The clock chimes... It's time for me to go... I've got a 70th birthday party for a very special woman to prepare for... Tick tock... Time to make a memory.