There was a time when my nephew, Mika, asked everyone he met how old they are. His mom explained, “he is currently obsessed with time.” He followed this up with a morbid statement, “people die when they grow old.” His young mind still cannot grasp the vastness of space and time between him and the “old”, between the tangible and a mere memory, between now and permanent absence. But he continues to ask, 'how old are you' or ‘wawa are you old?’ As if the numbers would give him comfort. I smile and say, “don’t worry Mika, I am still young.”

In a Vogue magazine article, I learned that Vladimir Nabokov also liked to talk about time.

“In what way?”
“In the morning, he would look at his watch and say, ‘I make it out to be 8:15; what do you have?”

Nabokov’s lifelong preoccupation, the article went on to say, was memory, things lost but still present.

While I, I am currently obsessed with freezing time--in digital pictures, in videos, in notebooks that I lug around, in all my documentation tools. I often find myself in the middle of a joke that had everyone laughing, or in between sips of wine at a family dinner, just taking a moment to commit everything to memory—how they laughed, what he said, what they said in return, what time of day it was. And I wonder, will I remember this exactly as it happened?

Or maybe, it’s just how Joel said it in Chronos (http://rambling-soul.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html) --

And it goes on and on, this pattern of forgetting,
like the erratic beating of hearts.
The learned calls it Pi, the endless, as if

the mind has no need to negotiate with time.