My grandfather is becoming senile. He forgets where he puts things. He forgets where he's going. He forgets why his foot has been bandaged up after they removed cancerous cells from his toes. But he can remember, like it was yesterday, being a kid in Canton and watching the giant forms of Han Chinese walking through the sky on the strutworks of the first bridge to span the Pearl River. He remembers discovering what a battery is, and trying to bring electricity to his parents' tiny third story apartment by rigging together an old battery, a light bulb, and some wires (it didn't work). He remembers going to missionary school in Shanghai, and skipping ahead two grades so that by the time World War II came to China he had just obtained the highest educational degree he would ever receive—his sixth grade certificate. He remembers fleeing before the Japanese invasion a second time as a young man, running and running until his shoes fell off and his feet began to bleed and running still some more with the sounds of tanks and machine guns behind him. He remembers the man who shared half a ball of rice with him on the evening he might have starved to death. And he remembers the day he ran into his sister, my aunty Pearl, months later at a church social in an inland city hundreds of miles away from home after they had lost touch with everyone else in their family.

I find it strange sometimes how incognizant we are of time, how mostly it slips out from under us quietly and unnoticed. Every day we wake up, we go about our business, we go to sleep. Someday we will wake up, blink our eyes, and find old age upon us. I told my grandmother that time seems to move faster as you get older. “Ha ha ha, try it when you're 84 years old!” she said. “The decades go by like they're nothing!”

And then there are the babies. In just a few short weeks they learn to smile, to use their eyes. They start to laugh, and crawl, and talk. It seems everyday they're noticeably changed. And their parents know that each moment they have with their child is something to be cherished, because in the binge of their unstoppable growth, the present moment is constantly being swept away by the next, and the next, and the next...