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IT MAY NOT BE THE EXACT MIDDLE, but I always count it that way--when July begins, we're starting the second half of the year. And there's a phenomenon that occurs, even with smaller increments than a year: when you get to the middle mark, time has a way of taking a big deep breath, kicking up its heels and sprinting toward the finish line!

Let's say that you arise at 6:30 a.m. (Uhm, I'm taking a stab in the dark here...which, to my way of thinking, is what you're doing most of the year when you insist on stumbling from the bed at that ungo- bite my tongue! I won't use that word--at that, ahem, very early hour. At any rate, I'm assuming it may be a common enough setting on the clocks that populate bedside stands.) Now, even for me, who likely ate breakfast when you were nibbling at your mid-morning snack, by two-thirty in the afternoon I'm getting the feeling that the hours of the day already spent were a big, expansive affair and what's left of the afternoon and evening will be a puny little sidekick, sticking around quite briefly.

Or consider a week's worth of days. Doesn't Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all the way up until sometime in the afternoon on Thursday offer a bargain's worth of hours compared to Thursday afternoon through Sunday evening? Why, it's like one of those optical illusions where you can't believe your eyes that both halves of the skewed image are of equal area?

For me, the same holds true in the measurement of a year. It seems like eons ago that I was stashing the Christmas ornaments and listening to Strauss waltzes. But will it seem like eons until the stores are slashing prices on 2010 calendars, giving a big push to get them sold by the last week of the year? Don't you just know that summer vacation will be over in the blink of an eye, and autumn--well, autumn's when the big get-ready-for Christmas hoopla begins.

Interestingly enough (or perhaps in a boring sort of way), I was going to move on to that most macro of time periods--a lifetime--and offer some sort of little profundity on the subject of how time gets warped after one passes the halfway point. But I've thought better of it. I'll just pass along the wisdom of my dad. After middle age, he used to say, it's like catching a ride on greased lightening. So there you have it-- time's a wastin'...I'd better kick up my heels and make the most of today!


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