EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY: Making Time

My dad bought me my first watch for a long-ago birthday. He picked it out of a plastic case which sat on the front counter at the local drug store, aptly named Drug City. The case spun around so you could look at all the choices, and he picked a Timex on a silver link chain that looked like a bracelet. I treasured it, mostly because my dad wasn’t one to buy us presents; that was my mom’s purview. I kept it for years after it stopped working in a little wooden jewelry box on my dresser. I don’t know where it is now.

I bought a second watch for myself on my first business trip. I was 22, fresh out of college and was working for a regional trade association. I was about to shepherd a group of businessmen on a round of meetings with their members of Congress at the Capitol. I panicked when I realized I didn’t have a watch to make sure they got to each meeting on time once we were in the building. I anxiously stopped in at the first store I saw on a D.C. street — it may actually have been a Smithsonian museum store — and bought the only watch that was affordable. I remember it had a section on the face with a small mechanical moon that moved across as time elapsed, changing phases. When I got to the first meeting on the Hill, the moon-moving watch on my wrist, I saw a huge clock behind the congressman’s desk — he, too, needed to track time so as not to be late for any votes. The moon watch was unnecessary as it turned out, but I came to love it.

I’ve had a few more traditional watches over the years, but for some reason I don’t hold on to them — each went the way of the first one from that long-ago birthday, lost to time.

Now, of course, we have our smartphones and smartwatches and smart appliances to stay on track.

This notion of time is on my mind in part because of the season, in part because of the milestone birthday of one of my children and in part because, here and there, I find I have a little more of it.

There’s no season that better captures the passage of time than spring. Each day seems to bring forward a new bud, a new leaf, a new shade of green. I wish I had the technological smarts to produce a time-lapse video of the trees and bushes coming to life in my backyard. Or the boats filling the harbor. Or the plants filling the rows at a garden center. Rebirth is all around us.

I think of that first watch I purchased and imagine finding one with hands that turn past the deepening greens from April to June — lime to emerald to forest.

My children’s birthdays are both in spring, and I remember when celebrations included Barney, Batman and American Girl dolls. I don’t need a timepiece to tell me how long ago those days were, how impossible I would have thought it to not even be physically with them as they turned 22 and 25.

Twenty-five! I was onto my second job, thought I was all grown up at that age, though not yet married or a mom. I can close my eyes and feel what I felt like then — how can it be that the little boy who danced with Barney on our deck is that same age?

When they were little, David, with his indefatigable enthusiasm, would urge Jack and Maddy to “Carpe diem” — seize the day — as I buttered their waffles and packed their lunches. I think I hid my eye-roll pretty well from them all. Who had time to seize the day when the amount of work that had to be squeezed into 24 hours practically squeezed the breath out of you?

Now, though, while there’s work to do — client Zoom calls, board responsibilities, writing projects, another closet to straighten — there’s also time to sit and watch the birds at the feeder, time to drive to a park and watch a thunderstorm move across the harbor.

When was the last time you sat in a car during a thunderstorm and followed the water droplets as they traced little paths down the window, putting your finger on them from inside and trying to follow along their route? Who has time for that? Unexpectedly, sometimes, I do. Or maybe more accurately, I make time.

David’s favorite scene from “Dead Poets’ Society” is in the classroom where a student is reciting the Robert Herrick poem with the line “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Then Robin Williams takes the class into the hallway where pictures of long-passed students are displayed.

Williams tries to impart the wisdom of the urgency of now to his young charges. “We are food for worms lads, because believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is going to stop breathing, turn cold and die… Carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”

I don’t regret my jam-packed past. But what a joy to have time to breathe. To not have to keep track of every minute, rushing from meeting to meeting, call to call, jumping in a taxi, running for the airplane gate, jamming my finger again and again on the elevator button as if that would summon it faster.

I am seizing a slower day, maybe not in the way Williams meant, but to me, making time, having time, feels pretty extraordinary.

A member of the Marblehead Current’s Board of Directors, Virginia Buckingham is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”