Time's A Slippery Substance Sometimes

I was stair-stepping at my customary leisurely pace the other afternoon and listening to Eddie Van Halen punish his fretboard on "Eruption" when it occurred to me that he recorded that epochal track in 1978.

That, I calculated after a moment of mental fumbling, was 30 years ago.

I immediately sensed a mistake — a likely thing since I am less than adept at math even with a full supply of oxygen.

It isn't conceivable, I decided, that Van Halen's debut album — cleverly titled "Van Halen" — came out three decades ago.

Jimmy Carter was president in 1978, and the movie "Grease" was released that year, and I refuse to concede that "Van Halen," a work of minor greatness, shared a year with both of those.

Foreigner, maybe.

Journey, absolutely.

But not Van Halen.

It is, of course, true.

That year, 1978, is printed on the liner for the CD jewel case, non-negotiable as a summons.

My instant of incredulity on the stair-stepper was neither the first time, nor will it will be the last, at which music demanded that I acknowledge the passage of time; and did so with a brutality that no photograph or other preserved slip of the past can quite muster.

I suspect music possesses this power — over me anyway — because I listen to a lot of it.

I doubt so much as a month ever passes when I don't hear at least one song from Van Halen's self-titled record. I own the CD, as I implied, and certain cuts — "Jamie's Cryin," "You Really Got Me" — endure as playlist staples for the radio stations I prefer.

What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that albums such as "Van Halen" attain as they age a certain continuity. When I marvel at Eddie's pyrotechnic playing today, I remember feeling just that way when I was 13 and fiddling with my decrepit red Fender, and the gap between those times seems to me inconsequential.

In that context, the truth — that the earliest pressings of the LP arrived at record stores the same year I turned eight — feels like a lie.

By way of contrast, my parents visited earlier this month and they brought a plastic tub stuffed with photographs and assorted detritus from my childhood. Apparently they're tired of storing this paraphernalia, because they didn't take it when they left.

There were, tucked between stacks of pictures, a dozen or so certificates honoring various of my scholastic achievements. All were of a decidedly modest nature, celebrating effort rather than success. I've concluded that only doting mothers such as mine are able to save these sorts of artifacts. What we would do without mothers I don't like to think.

My point, though, lies elsewhere.

As I sifted through the photos and the commendations, some of which I hadn't touched in at least a dozen years, they seemed to me to belong to an altogether separate, and quite distant, era.

As I read a letter congratulating me for not winning a spelling contest in 1981, I barely paused when I realized that my failure happened 27 years ago. It seemed at least that long, so flimsy is my memory of the event.

I vaguely recall botching an embarrassingly easy word — "community" — by leaving out the "n" in my haste to escape the pressure of all those eyes and slink back to my seat. But maybe that was a different contest. There was a similarly ghastly incident involving the "gh" in spaghetti, as well, but I doubt I lose the same bee twice.

The bottom line, I guess, is that the true essence of time forever eludes us. It trudges ahead as ever, irrepressible as the tides that bludgeon the beach, and yet we can no more corral time than we can grasp a fistful of fog on a chill dawn and slip it into a pocket.

A piece of popular music retains every bit of its vigor even after 30 years, yet the memory of a contest that isn't so old seems ancient.

If time is a substance — and that is how I think of it, as something with weight — then it must have the properties of a fluid, at the same time shapeless yet capable of taking any form a person can imagine.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.