Last Tuesday evening, before I left the office for the day, I tore off my desktop calendar page for June, signifying, once again, that one half of the year was gone.
It really is true. The older one gets, the faster time flies.
I used to hear that saying as a youngster and wonder how that could be. A minute was a minute, an hour an hour, a day a day. Time was time. How could it possibly pass more quickly as one aged?
But how we fill our days and the calendars of our lives is more than just documentation of what we do — it's a reflection of who we are.
I have kept my desktop calendars for many years. Categorized in folders by the years, I often use them to reference certain events that have happened in our community and determine dates for searching our story archives. On a personal note, on today's date in 1991, I had no appointments but managed to work 10 hours that day. Back then, I documented the number of hours I worked each day on my calendar. July 5, 1991, fell on a Friday, and most Fridays are long days in a newsroom. We aren't just working on the next day's paper. We are working on the Sunday and Monday editions, to a certain extent, as well.
July 5, 1995, was a busy day. I had back-to-back appointments with Evelyn Rice, Cornie Fletcher and a former county extension agent. Just guessing from the list of people with whom I scheduled interviews, I must have been working on a story about home canning. Additionally that day, I covered the city commission meeting. I can also assume by reviewing my July 1995 calendar page that we must have been in one of those transition periods between reporters, because I was covering the education and city hall beats at the same time.
Skipping to 1997, my July was filled with NISD budget workshops, which back then were often held at Pine Creek Lodge. I also had an appointment at R&E Orchards (peach harvesting time), and a family reunion in Galveston was scheduled for mid-July.
By 1999, I had been serving as managing editor for a couple of years, and my calendar reflected not only my own appointments but those of the staff as well. That's the only way I could keep up with who was covering what. Everyone's appointments with their initials beside them completely covered each day's date. That month, I also covered the dedication of the Historic Town Center, a mock stroke drill at World Class Auto, the monthly school board meeting and had several other routine interviews. We also held our usual first Do Dat Barbecue planning meeting of the year in July — an item that no longer appears on my July calendar these days.
Fast forward to July 2002, and my calendar reflects visits from Rick Perry at the Old University Building and David Dewhurst at the CVB, our annual coverage of the Timpson Frontier Days and Center What-A-Melon Festival, and a story about a new shrimp farm in the county. A family reunion was planned for late July, this time at our new home on Lake Nacogdoches. It would be the first of many family reunions we would host in years to come.
Last year's July calendar page should be much more familiar to me than those of more than a decade past, but there are many items on it that are foreign — maybe another sign of time passing too quickly for daily happenings to become memorable. Appointments and meetings for which I used abbreviations mean nothing to me now.
This July's calendar is filling quickly with meetings and deadlines. And it won't be long before this page before me now will also be torn from the desk and filed away.
