JESS DU JOUR: PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY AND TIME...AND PEANUT BUTTER

"Alas! how swift the moments fly!

How flash the years along!

Scarce here, yet already gone by,

The burden of a song.

See childhood, youth, and [wo]manhood pass,

And age with furrowed brow;

Time was -- Time shall be -- drain the glass --

But where in time is now?"

-- John Quincy Adams, The Hour Glass ([wo] added)

Adams, though he is very dead, is very much alive in the minds of anxious college students like myself.

In four weeks, whether we trek 15 miles or 600 miles to our college campuses, we will be inaugurating a new phase of our lives -- a phase where we will embrace new, intriguing thoughts and people while simultaneously consuming metric tons of lumpy cafeteria food.

It will be grand.

Lately, though, I've been whirlwinded into a tiny paradox where the time I have left here can't move fast enough, and yet the time I have left here seems to be slipping through my fingers.

The mail I get from DePauw University makes things worse. When they mail enticing newsletters about my roommate and my new dorm and freshman orientations, the Jackson minutes seem like millennia and the hands on the clocks in Jackson crawl around in circles like drowsy sloths.

However, when my eight-year-old sister Callie hugs my waist and looks up and asks, "Jess, are you gonna leave me soon?", the paradox tips in the opposite direction. Her despondently innocent question tells me that the four weeks I have left won't be enough time to reassure her that I do not want to leave her.

My friends from the senior class, who are also spiraling in time paradoxes, can only grin excitedly at me when I talk about college, and babble about their own departure dates. But they nod in agreement and gaze sympathetically when I mention that I might miss a few people here, and that the summer seems like it's ending before it has had time to begin.

Often times, people greet me with a cheesy grin and the singular, ever-present question, "When do you leave?"

I understand perfectly. Most of the people around me realize that, nearly every day, many of my thoughts are channeled directly into a dorm room at DePauw. My conversations usually end with catch-all phrases like, "Well, it doesn't really matter, I'll be leaving soon," or "No, if I need anything, I can get it at DePauw."

The one-question conversations and the ultimate destinational cliches are all appropriate; yet they make my time in these last four weeks precious and rather chaotic. "Excited about going?" "Sad about leaving?" they ask.

"Both," I always answer, wondering if they understand that their pointed questions have placed my thoughts in limbo again, and that my time and feelings about Southeast Missouri are approaching complete immeasurability.

Once, I entertained the thought of putting a trite phrase like "time flies when you're _____ ______" (fill in the blanks) into my column about time. I make it a point, however, to combat trite phrases and think of my own creative sayings; all I could come up with were things like:

"Time flies when you're stomping on cantaloupes",

and,

"Time flies when you're snorting peanut butter."

So I gave up. Pausing for a moment of deep introspection, I conceded that the real message I was trying to convey about the rapidly-dwindling summer and the seemingly quick passage of time was not a silly, peanut-buttery message at all. In fact, it was a very serious one.

Austin Dobson, in his book "The Paradox of Time", said, "Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Time stays, WE go."

And so I shall. I have a mere three weeks before I leave for Indiana, and it will be here before I know it.

Jessica McCuan is an intern at the Southeast Missourian.