Wasted Time

One of the items I listed in the things I’ve learned from my journals was that I have not wasted enough time with Sharon.  Later in the day I wondered if that might be misunderstood.  I was NOT saying that at some point I will have wasted enough time on Sharon and we’re through.  (Although, unfortunately, there was a short season early in our marriage when I thought of this phrase in those terms.  Fortunately I came to my senses.)

What I was alluding to was the advice the fox gives to the little prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic, The Little Prince.  (A book Sharon introduced me to in 1972.) 

The little prince comes from a planet that has just one rose that he must care for.  He thinks she is the only rose in the universe.  When he arrives on earth he discovers that there are millions of roses.  But the fox points out that the little prince’s rose not like all the other roses because of the time he has spent with her, caring for her, talking with her.  He has, in the fox’s words, “tamed” her, and she him, because they have “established ties” through the daily-ness of life.  Through daily and weekly rites they have become “unique in all the world” to each other. 

Then the fox says, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important…You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.  You are responsible for your rose…”

That, dear reader, is what I was referring to when I said I had not wasted enough time on Sharon.  (Who, by the way, I often refer to as Rose.)  She is not like the millions of other women in the world.  She is unique in all the world because of having tamed me through thousands of little words, looks, touches and experiences together.  This accumulation of life together over almost forty years of marriage and almost forty two years of friendship has established ties that will not be broken.

And so, I say it again.  I have not wasted enough time on Sharon.  May God grant us many more years of wasted time.