(Thomas Froese Photo)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, May 31, 2025)
Before I tell you about the car crash, today’s fun fact is that 166 years ago, on May 31, 1859, Big Ben in London, the world’s largest four-faced chiming clock, started its first tick-tock.
So let’s talk about time.
An older friend recently told me how time speeds up as you age. You know the other expressions. Time waits for nobody. There’s a time for everything. Time flies. We don’t look up at some clock blazing through the clouds. We understand what it means.
Time is seen as a commodity. And it’s neutral. Like the ocean. It’s up to us whether we sink or swim in it. Time, apparently, doesn’t care.
But what if this is wrong? What if time is mysteriously on our side, cheering for us? What if time, in fact, exists for no other reason than for us to grow, even slow and steady like that tortoise who outpaced the hare? What if the entirety of life asks nothing more of us than this? What if the world itself is designed with this, our growth, in mind?
Spring is a season to think about it, time and the beautifully chaotic nature of things.
Stanley Jones, a writer my father would read at the kitchen table when I was a boy, would say that we’re born into a world that’s intentionally imperfect, a world with plenty of weeds and snakes and earthquakes and sickness. Why? So we can work to develop pesticides and antidotes and earthquake-proof buildings and medicines and you get the idea.
This is the deal. The offer. A measure of happiness, contentment really, comes through this resilience, like a seed that harnesses everything it can – sunshine, water and nutrients – to become the tree it’s meant to be. In this there’s paradox as we learn, before our inevitable death, if nothing else, how to be dependant.
Speaking of, last May we buried my wife’s father. The previous May we buried my wife’s mother. The May before that we buried my father. His death especially comes to mind as a reminder of how life can be like a game of inches and seconds.
“Dad’s dying,” I said to my wife that day. “The hospital called. There’s no time.” She said she’d drop everything at work to meet me at the hospital parking lot, out of town 45 minutes away. We agreed we’d then walk into the hospital together.
I arrived and phoned Jean. All she said was “Thom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Over and over. “I’m sorry.” Was Dad Froese already in eternity? Was Jean inside the hospital already? Was I too late?
Instead I learned that my wife was in a grim car crash. She never got out of town, never mind to any hospital parking lot. She escaped serious injury. The car? Totalled.
Then my wife’s sister, the children’s aunt, scooped Jean and then also our children, all together, and brought everyone to join others at my father’s deathbed. He held on for some time, and what followed was a more complete and gentler family goodbye, a meaningful memory that never would have unfolded without that crash.
And the license plate on our car? It’s AWFE-552. More than 20 years ago that letter-number combination was given from the license people to us as standard issue. Vehicle after vehicle we’ve since kept it as a bit of a joke, a reminder of how it seemed there were 551 contenders – that took time – before I found my wife, or she found me, or however all that works.
Now on our current family car, that plate is also a daily reminder of how life can be like that game of inches and seconds. This is the sorry truth. We’re all just a snake bite or tornado or crash away from catastrophe. If it doesn’t get us, it will get our loved ones.
We wish it weren’t true. It all seems so horribly random.
And yet.