Losing track of time

You know why time seems to fly by?

I’ve just figured it out. It has little to do with getting older. It always seemed that the older you get the faster time goes by — once you get over the hill you pick up speed.

I used to think that, but I don’t any more.

Time flies by because people who are involved with mass marketing make us think it does. Case in point: Here it is August. We can still wear white shoes and pants. Pools haven’t closed yet. People are still grilling in their backyards. By all accounts, it’s summer.

But walk into any grocery or mart store and the first thing you see is Halloween candy. It’s out already. So is pumpkin spice flavored everything from chewing gum to cat litter.

That tricks us into thinking it’s fall. So we pick up a bag of Snickers here, and a couple of bags of candy corn there, and the next thing we know time has flown from August to October.

We open the bags of Halloween candy so we can sample one and make sure it’s fresh, and the next thing you know it’s all gone. Gotta get some more to have for the Trick or Treat ghoulies who come begging at the door. So we buy more, advancing the days even farther into fall. We can’t very well give the little beggars stale candy — if indeed any is left — so we buy even more, and that brings us to Christmas.

What happened to what was left of August, September and November?

Christmas stuff comes into the stores sometimes around the same time Halloween decorations arrive, so it can be easy to lose track of time. Then before the outdoor lights even come down, next thing you know the marketers are pushing heart-shaped boxes of chocolates on consumers. So now we’ve gotten all the way to February and the last thing we knew it was August and we were wondering how long this year’s T-shirts could stand another round in the washer.

I bet if we actually figured up all those lost months throughout the years we might realize that we are actually as young as we claim to be.