When Will My Last Thursday Be? I'm Not A Fan of Endings
The end is coming. If not this year, then next. If not next year, then one day for sure — no doubt, I promise. And none of this factors in an untimely death, which is always possible.
Is this an essay about death? Of course not! It’s about cartoons!
Wait. What?
Every Thursday during the school year since 2021, I’ve written a bad dad joke on a square piece of paper accompanied by a silly cartoon drawing and put it on the mailboxes at the end of our shared private driveway, which doubles as the school bus stop. I do it for my young neighbors, a brother and sister, and often when I walk down there with my flashlight on Wednesday night in stealth mode to set up the joke, I regret not thinking of the idea sooner, when my kids were young. You live and learn.
Across the top of the paper, as you can see, it says, “Thursday is Joke Day”. Why did I choose Thursday? We’ll never know. While it does take a bit of dedication throughout the school year to make these things, I love to walk down to the mailboxes each Wednesday night. It’s become my thing. I always hope they elicit a tiny smile come Thursday morning, which would be remarkable given the jokes are extremely bad. To be clear, I steal the jokes from various websites. I’m sure I could come up with something better if I put my mind to it.
[No, you couldn’t, sweetheart.]
One day, I know, my young neighbors will grow too old for such ridiculousness, and Joke Day will be shut down. The end. No more. Yet, I don’t want things to end. I don’t want life to end, or parenting, or careers, schooling, places of residency, proximity to loved ones, seasons. Time.
But if things didn’t end, how could others begin?
I started my mailbox comics to create a link between the Covid shutdown and post-shutdown. I’d grown close to the four kids I “taught” in my driveway art “classes” during the shutdown. Essentially, we hung out together, sometimes drawing cartoons.
I’d set up a portable table on their respective driveways, where we’d draw, laugh, and chat, the fresh air livening us and buffering us from a potential viral spread. I didn’t want to say goodbye to these kids once life got back to normal and driveway art classes were no longer needed.
I invented Joke Day, the continuity. As the years inched on, I noticed that each September, my young neighbors got older. This happened to my sons, too. Come to think of it, it happened to me. Frankly, I’ve noticed it happens to everyone. It’s a biological sort of thing. Time watches us living creatures age day by day, even if we rarely notice.
When this essay comes out, it’ll be mere hours after the September equinox here in the eastern US, the moment when Earth is perpendicular to the Sun-Earth line, when it’s sitting up nice and straight in its chair relative to the Sun. This is when day and night are approximately equal in length, and Time has a party with itself because this little planet Earth is reminded of the passing of minutes into days into months and beyond.
Me personally? I don’t want to be reminded of time passing. However, the risk of not noticing is to be blindsided one day by the shock of life having passed me by, of never noticing because I was too scared, or sad, or distracted to see.
Letting go of a tradition is one of those reminders and, frankly, it’s a gift I’d be wise to accept and process.
I take a handful of different pills twice each day, and if you have to do such a thing, you hopefully use weekly pill boxes to execute such a meticulous undertaking. The alternative is to open each pill bottle every day (perhaps twice a day) to get your pills, and run the risk of forgetting to take some. For me, it’s better if I don’t forget. If I opt to open each pill bottle every day, well, goodbye to my mornings and evenings. And while I exaggerate, it’s certainly a hassle.
I now have pill boxes that cover four weeks. Best decision I ever made.
The only problem with pill boxes is that they show you how fast time goes. I can’t begin to tell you how fast Friday arrives each week. It’s far faster than you think. I hate to break it to you; the equinoxes aren’t any slower. Time is speedy.
Even longer chapters of life seem to come and go faster than we realize, until their conclusion arrives and we put our hand perpendicular to our eyes like a shade from the sun and look backwards at time. We see how fast it took to get here. It never seems fast at its inception. Strange how that works. I find that with age, though, I’m starting to look into the future at how fast a chapter will take to play out. It’s not cool. Not cool at all.
So, it’s about acceptance — as if I had any better choice — and embracing the value of what comes next: opportunities for myself and others, all the metaphorical equinoxes that arrive for all of us, old and young, seers of time or not. For example, high school and middle school, the places that nurture you toward an age when Thursday mailbox jokes might no longer be needed.
If I look at the tilting, spinning world from this perspective, I see two young people entering a chapter of excitement, slow-growing wisdom — pain and joy both. Moving into adulthood is one of those chapters we often don’t forget, thanks to its expansive newness — ups, downs, sideways twirls. It’s a rich time in one’s life. It has bigger things to tend to than mailbox jokes, if you can even call them jokes.
Likewise, the aging neighborhood Joke Day lady has much to process herself. She is in that chapter where looking back is a constant invitation. It’s a chapter where embracing the big picture, gratitude, and acceptance is the order of the day, each day.
Jokes will come and go, and I don’t necessarily have to give them up. I can do them for my adult friends, and I do. I share Thursday jokes on social media, and I get small but consistent applause from my appreciative friends. Who knows? I might not shut down Joke Day. I might keep going for the older crowd for as long as it feels right.
Time will tell. It always does.
Have a nice rest of your week, friends.
Comments