Time

Two college guys getting ready to leave. Every week one of the remaining IT guys packs up; it’s been like that all year. We’re down to the last five; five guys all finishing their last few days, or weeks, in here; guys finishing their time. Time. What is it? In here, it’s a whole lot … and it’s nothing.

“Seen a man standin over a dead dog lyin by the highway in a ditch. He’s lookin down kinda puzzled pokin that dog with a stick. Got his car door flung open he’s standin out on Highway 3. Like if he stood there long enough that dog get up and run. Struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me. At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Bruce understands time. Guy’s looking at his dog, thinking he’ll just jump up and go. But he won’t. The time is gone. Time, “a system of measuring duration.” In here, time is everything … and nothing. 

My friend DC has been locked up for forty-two years, let me write that again: 42. 1972 he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery within weeks of the Olympic boxing trials. Nineteen years old and the world waiting to see him in the ring. It didn’t start out as forty-two, the court gave him twelve. Back then you earned 30 for 30; twelve was a max of six. At four, DC made parole, everybody made parole. The weekend before his release there was payback and dead convicts. DC was in solitary facing death or life behind bars … and time moved on.

Mikey, the middle class white kid and so damn smart for fifteen. He stabs a neighbor kid to death and at fifteen he escapes capital murder for a first-degree plea. “Do 25 on 50.” Fifteen years old, what do you know about how long twenty-five years is? Now, he’s 36 and he’s spent more time behind bars than outside. “Under four,” he said a few weeks ago.

You hear years thrown around with almost hushed reverence: 25, 20, 15, 8, 6. On and on time goes. Six years; six years since my arrest. What is it? Divorce; longing; guilt; redemption. There were missed graduations, birthdays, weddings. Tears shed; smiles of nostalgia. “Time heals all wounds,” bullshit. “Time waits for no one,” true. “Time is what you make of it,” thank God!

Years are handed down arbitrarily as though in some mystical calculus this precise number of years, this time, adequately punishes. How many years, how much time is a life worth? How many years equals $2 million? I don’t know the answer. But, I know time doesn’t serve anyone well as a punishment. I asked Mikey one day if he thought his victim’s family has had their pain lessened any by him being in here 21 years. “I don’t think so,” was all he could say.

There was a time during this six years when I thought this time – so arbitrary, so long – was meant to kill me, to break me and leave me with nothing. And then, miraculously, I came to understand time is in His hands. It was no longer a sentence but an opportunity. And my friend DC? “I’m a better man now than I was back then,” he told me. I believe him.

Time wears men down in here. Even short runs – two or three year bits – break men. Life outside moves on and if you dwell on it, it’ll destroy you. Maybe, just maybe that’s where the punishment comes in. One day or ten, if you dwell on the time and thieving nature of it you will succumb. So, you look beyond the years, you look to the future, to life. You look, you hope, you live. Even in here, you live.

Guys prepare to leave. They get quiet; they stay to themselves; they run through all the “what-ifs” – what if I can’t make it out there? But the time comes and they go.

I don’t know how much time a crime is worth. In my former life I thought I knew it all. Now, I have more questions than answers. Like the “Hamburglar” he leaves tomorrow. Eleven years for sexually assaulting a little girl. Has eleven years “cleansed him,” made him realize his sexual proclivities are twisted? I don’t think so. He’s returning to his mother’s home convinced he is the victim. Has eleven years made the neighbors forget what happened? Time has changed nothing, and that is the cruel truth when we rely on time; it has no feeling, no emotion, it just is. 

“Lord won’t you tell us tell us what it means

So at the end of every hard-earned day people 

find some reason to believe.”

Time moves on. New guys show up; old guys go home. People’s lives move on; nothing stays static. You can drift through life – inside or outside – or you can find the reason you’re where you are at that moment. Time is nothing but a measurement. Life is so much more than time. And maybe, just maybe that’s what I needed to learn to begin again. Forty-two years or forty-two days, time is what you do with it.