The Essence of Time
I was watching the Miami Heat game last night, and Tim Hardaway Jr. checked in wearing his dad’s retired number, 10. The announcer flogged my life by saying that Tim Hardaway played for the Heat 30 years ago. I had season tickets to the Heat in law school and went to about 35 of the 41 games each season when Tim Hardaway and Alonzo Mourning were dominating. I named my first cat Hardaway after Tim. All I got out of this game was that I am old.
What is time if not a continuum of our memories? I don’t understand how that was thirty years ago. I remember that time of my life so clearly. Law school was a three-year cavalcade of mild adulting and abject wilding. I remember the sweat on my Property professor's upper lip because she was pregnant and orating to a small auditorium of graduate students. I was so in on myself at that time in my life that I thought that she and I had a vibe. Then I went to the Davie Ale House, got five beers in a bucket for five dollars, and forgot about it.
Having a photographic memory is cool, sometimes. I can see the freckled face of one of my female best friends in the summer of 1989, sitting cross-legged in just a borrowed T-shirt on my single bed with Star Wars sheets, laughing her New York laugh. I can see and hear my mom struggling to get out of the car in that same summer because her bone cancer was spreading. This morning I was worried about a little back pain.
I once fell asleep on the former owner of the San Diego Chargers’ private plane and woke up with a pimple under the lower corner of my nose. It was definitely not there when I went to sleep. I felt like I was being taught a lesson. There is a photo of me and one of my best friends in the Winner’s Circle with Lady Secret from that trip. We also drank as much champagne as we could find. We were 15.
Time is like taffy at a Midwest carnival in the throes of summer. It expands and stretches, but never seems to break. I wonder what the staff thought of us at HSF, where my stepbrothers and I ate dim sum all the time as a pre-pre-game to a night out. No group has ever eaten more har gow. I remember laying a printed photo of my kids at the feet of my dad in the ICU after he had a liver transplant, hoping to whatever I believed in that he would wake up again. Now I’m 55, typing on a laptop on a day off from work so my kid and I can go to see the new Nathan Fielder movie.
I can see my daughter sucking her thumb and twirling her hair while laying on our vizsla. Now she’s 23. I can feel myself riding in the back of a white Volkswagen van with a desk so I could do my stats as we rode from Brooklyn Heights to Amagansett or Doylestown. I can taste a Welch’s grape soda. I remember my friend, Adam, teaching me how to craft the perfect turkey sandwich by adding just one slice of salami at our favorite sub shop in Plantation. I thought he died of cancer, but a friend recently told me he died by suicide.
Time blows through the space between my arm and body. I sit cross-legged in a kindergarten play, portraying a Native American in a way that would get a kindergarten canceled now. A future movie star is sitting across from me. I had the hots for her at 4 years old. I was completely in love with my second-grade teacher. At some point in my memory, I think love at first sight was possible. We casually dated, and it went nowhere.
My grandma taught me how to crack walnuts, and it was way harder than I expected. When I did it by myself for the first time, I felt like I had won a Nobel Prize. My other grandma pretended like she was senile, but I knew she wasn’t. She just didn’t know how to deal with the loss of her husband. Everyone talked over her as if she was kind of there, but she would wink at me to let me know she was more than that. Then she would pee in the seat she was sitting in.
© Jonathan Greene, October 22, 2026
