If I Could Keep Time in a Bottle

The song was a hit in 1973 when I was a high school sophomore, the time when I almost ended myself for the severe depression that the repressed memory of being assaulted at ten infected me with. And it was Jim Croce’s second number-one hit, top of the charts, released after he had already passed in a plane crash. It was a song about saving up time to spend with someone you loved more than life itself. A sad song, given the impossibility of putting time in a bottle, unfortunate considering Croce’s time ran out before the song even hit the airwaves.

We loved that song so much that it was the first choice for a Prom Theme the next year when I was a junior and in charge of the artwork for decorating the high school gym for Prom. Yes, doing all that art was one of the things that kept me from putting a knife in my own chest the previous Spring. I savored that song. I designed wall posters and backgrounds for the walls during the dance. And I did it all again when the theme was changed from “Time in a Bottle” to “The Circus.” I drew a leopard in a circus wagon life-sized. I captured a moment in time in tempura paint on a massive sheet of paper. I remember three of the girls fighting over the piece when the Prom was over. I wonder if someone still has that leopard somewhere. I don’t remember which girl won the fight.

My best friend in high school, Byron, who later went on to get a medical degree and become Dr. Bonte in Minnesota, is now gone. He died from muscular dystrophy a couple of decades ago. My mother and father are both gone now. Both of my father’s siblings, Aunt Jean and Uncle Skip, are also gone, along with their spouses. My mother’s older brother, Uncle Larry, is also long gone of cancer. In fact, my Uncle Don, and Uncle Larry’s wife are the only members of my parents’ generation in our family who are still living. They were all alive in 1973 when “Time in a Bottle” played at least five times a day on the Iowa rock and roll station on AM radio, WHO from Des Moines.

I guess all of that is in my Memory Bottle? I can’t actually spend any of the time with them. But I metaphorically can. And I have left the fruit of my experiences in 24 books so far, another Bottle Out of Time. 24 bottles metaphorically.

So, now that I am ill, almost seventy and definitely closer to the grave than the day of my birth, maybe I don’t need to despair. I can remember the song. I can open a bottle of vintage time. Somewhere it’s 1973 again. And someone is listening to a ghost voice on the radio singing,
“If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you“

That may be all we ever need to require of time. Once we’ve lived it, it is ours forever.

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