Where does the time go?

It’s not all that impressive, really. A simple wooden hoop and a bit of fabric stitched with the image of Oscar the Grouch.

We have several more, similar to it — Cookie Monster, Elmo, Big Bird, the whole Sesame Street gang. For me, the characters pretty much date them. It’s been a long time since Bert and Ernie were regular guests at our house, but every year, for about a month, they all dangle from the branches of a fast dying evergreen as we hurry ourselves through Advent, Christmas and New Year’s.
We put up the tree this weekend. Sort of sandwiched it in between the workweek, laundry, weekend errands and another week on the job. One more thing to be checked off the holiday to-do list, one more milestone on the fast track to January.

So there I was, perched on the stepladder, hurry-up supper of frozen pizza and second-rate beer throwing my center of gravity off-center, looking to find a suitable twig for The Grouch’s annual appearance and found myself looking at Oscar and wondering where the time came from.

Counted cross-stitch is a fussy, futzy thing. So many Xs of one color, then so many of another. A process no easier to hurry than a glacier, no less demanding of attention than calculus. Oh, it’s nothing I’ve managed personally. My early life experiences with needle and thread quickly ruled out surgery as a career path and I have neither the patience nor the eyesight to combine floss and fabric into folk art. But Gayle did. Time, skill and a few cents worth of materials. There you have it.

Where did the time come from? How many hours were spent working with needle and floss on ornaments that would be out of the box a scant month in the year?

It’s not that the days were any longer then — in those years when we couldn’t imagine a time when Snuffleupagus wouldn’t be as real in our living room as the clicking clockwork baby swing. There were seven days to the week, 24 hours to the day — yet in those days there was time enough for cross stitch and Dr. Seuss. Time to stalk toads in the summer. Time to make angels in the snow.

Granted, we were helped along. The TV got four channels — poorly. Computers were for calculating the electric bill. There were no Baby Einstein classes for the toddlers; neither Mom nor Dad felt a need to rush down to the Y. It was 35 miles to the nearest drive-through, so by and large we did our eating at home. We had more time than money — but to be sure, we

didn’t plan it that way.

Tevye put it well, “It’s no shame

to be poor, but it’s no great honor either.” But it seemed as our income grew, time shrank. At some point, Gayle put away her embroidery hoops; I started picking up takeout on the way home. Our time was less and less our own, but we, perhaps, were too busy to notice.

Which made it so much easier to give in to the yagottas. Yagotta give your kids the advantages — and

they always come with fees and memberships and arbitrary, intrusive schedules. Yagotta get the promotion … no matter that it’s a job you don’t want, can’t do and won’t pay much better than doing what you love … yagotta.

And the holidays are prime yagotta time. Yagotta buy the right gift or they won’t love you anymore; yagotta go here, go there, make everybody happy. Yagotta.

The days aren’t long enough to do all yagotta.

But they used to be. They used to be long enough to spend hours stitching memories into a little swatch of fabric taut in a plain wooden hoop. They were long enough for giggles and Dr. Seuss, for endless talk of “when I grow up…” though no one could imagine that when would ever really come.

But it has, and we have Bert, Ernie, Oscar and Kermit to bring the memories back in a rush, but only because we used the time to make the memories when memories were there for the making.

The days were no longer then, the time is no less precious now. What we let into our days; what we crowd out will follow into tomorrow and beyond, maybe not as little hooped samplers, but, no doubt, in ways just as unlikely. Perhaps, just perhaps, the days are still long enough. If we let them, only if we let them.

Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winona

dailynews.com.

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