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Pop Music, Scourge of the Onelys (Part 1 of 8,593): Measuring time in relationship units July 2, 2008

For our first installment of “Pop Music: Scourge of the Onelys”, I would like to highlight Kenny Chesney’s “Don’t Blink”. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would marry Kenny if he asked me (any day now), but I have to comment on these lyrics, which I heard for the eighty-twelfth time during my commute today:  

“Don’t blink
Just like that you’re six years old and you take a nap and you
Wake up and you’re twenty-five and your high school sweetheart becomes your wife
Don’t blink
You just might miss your babies growing like mine did”

And I was thinking about how so often we measure the passage of time in units of relationships, marriages, and children. I met an old highschool friend recently. We talked about our classmates who were on their second marriages and fourth children. Both of us are Onelys, never married, no kids. At one point during this conversation we looked at at each other, and I said, “So what did we do for sixteen years, then?” And for a panicked second I struggled to think what I have to show for the last decade and a half. If we measure in marriage and kids units, not much. Even if we measure in committed-relationship units, I think I would still come up short. But if we measure in friends and family units, then suddenly my last sixteen years look a lot more full. And if we measure in graduate degrees, friends’ asses saved, cats’ asses saved, life lessons learned, smiles to strangers, books read, languages learned, trips travelled, thoughts written, jobs held, and so forth, then I have enough to fill several minivans, and so does my Onely high school friend. Phew!! For a second I thought I’d blinked away 16 years. . .

-CC