Whirligigging Time

Topsy-Turvy

A former student posted "The Disease of Being Busy" by Omid Safi on Facebook today. It makes me happy that she posted the article, proving her worth as a teacher and person.

Everyone on campus right now answers "How's it going?" with "Busy, busy, busy."

This morning, a friend took a portrait of me with an old large format camera and said he'd be spending the night in the photo lab with students. Why? They wait till the end of term to do their projects. They've been busy otherwise, I suppose.

I was busy today: I met with my friend, went grocery shopping (once for me and another shorter trip for an ill friend), took pictures in my neighbor's yard and in Abbo's Alley, worked for about an hour and a half, tried to use Lightroom, ate supper, looked at Facebook, and wrote this blog post. But I'm not tired and I'm not stressed because I moved at my own pace.

Turns out putting on a watch today was pointless. I never looked at it till I got home and noticed something odd.

Instead of turning it around, I just took it off and put it on the desk, where it sits most of the time.

The great thing about my life now is that I'm only as busy as I want to be. I only wish that were true of more people, especially children in American schools where everything is structured by adult convenience of lives lived by the clock.

At least, my former student knows that, and I trust she has figured out how to make the system work for her students and herself.

Measuring Time

I used to wear a watch every day (often in my sleep), and I needed a clock in my classroom. Time matters when you have only so many minutes before a class-ending bell.

Now I wear a watch only occasionally.

I am more likely to notice time by the light and temperature and arrivals and departures of seasons. 

Take today, for example. The crocus are up now in Abbo's Alley. They weren't up just a few days ago. I know because I looked for them. This is the time of transition from winter to spring, from fog and rain and ice and snow to blue skies and blooms. 

Soon it will be spring -- I will know its arrival by the first Odonate I see at the lake. The heart of summer arrives on the wings of Widow Skimmers and Slaty Skimmers, and fall means mature Autumn Meadowhawks and Shadow Darners.

When I hear others say there aren't enough hours in a day, I feel sorry for them. There are only 24 hours, and there will always be only 24 hours, no matter how much we wish otherwise. 

It isn't a question of hours; it's how they're spent.

Countdown

MISER TIME

by Kay Ryan

Miser time grows

profligate near the

end: unpinching

and unplanning,

abandoning the

whole idea of

savings. It’s hard

to understand

but time apparently

expands with its

diminishing. The

door thrown wide

on sliding hills of high-

denomination bills and

nothing much to buy.

The Present Clock

After raising more than enough money on Kickstarter, m ss ng p eces now sells The Present Clock, a beautiful reminder of how we truly live in time, moving imperceptibly from moment to moment.


ThePresent from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.

Without a watch, without a clock, with only a few appointments I must attend to at certain times, I have been living more and more this way over the last four years, and I am more and more happy as a result.  I work (mostly) when I want to, I eat when I want to, I bathe when I want to, I walk when I want to, . . . without feeling the pressure of obeying a cruel schedule set by someone else.

Imagine, then, my surprise when -- thinking about the beautiful metaphor of The Present Clock -- I saw this tree at the entrance to Abbo's Alley.

When did December 12 look like spring?  Has the present become the past?

I feel more out of time than ever!

On Time

Time: divider of days and years, beat of music and poetry, long slog of history and light from distant stars, anxiety of anticipation and drudgery of boredom, interval of action and inaction, stream Thoreau went a-fishing in, something to work against and get ahead of and waste and make the most of, arbiter of patience and impatience, friend and foe, concept and energy, movement of molecules.

All the time today, I wore time wrong-side-up and never knew it till I took time off and put it back where it belongs: away.

The New Yorker

When I was 15 and bored, a Brooke Hill librarian saved my reading life: she introduced me to Scientific American, Time, and The New Yorker.

I well thumbed every new issue of all three magazines through the rest of high school. I'm not sure how much I understood of the first, though I had aspirations of studying molecular biology. I do know I read the second thoroughly. As for the third, I loved it in 1962 and I still love it today, though in some ways it is not the same magazine.

One thing hasn't changed: the way I read The New Yorker for the clever cartoons, and the beautiful (and sometimes controversial) painted covers.

I turn every page, noting the events and table of contents, studying each cartoon, enjoying the filler-drawings (and I love the continuing narratives implied by them in today's magazine), glancing at marginal advertisements (I usually skip the whole-page ones), reading the poems, and, today, laughing at the cartoon caption contest on the last page (I even sometimes go online and vote). Then, I go back and read the reviews (books, TV, film, and plays), selected long articles, and skim "The Talk of the Town." (Before these pieces were signed -- was that during Tina Brown's tenure? -- , I read them all for the famous "New Yorker style." I liked those talk-pieces better than most today.) I rarely read the short fiction, with the exception of works by writers in whom I'm interested. I do remember a fairly recent, terrific and strange story by Tony Earley and Annie Proulx' "Brokeback Mountain." I miss some columnists whose work was regular. (I especially enjoyed Jamaica Kincaid's gardening columns, of all things. I'm not a gardener myself.)

My favorite part of the magazine is the cover. I miss the brown-wrapper mailing days because then the cover was always pristine. I frequently saved the covers to decorate my dorm rooms in college, and then I saved them for decoupaging my guitar case, and then I saved them to post in my classroom. Now, I can't get the dadgum label off without stripping off some part of the cover design. Each is a left-framed work of original art worth saving.

(As I write this, I remember the fabulous pool house owned by friends of my parents. The "powder room" was wallpapered with New Yorker covers, not the originals but some fancy wallpaper popular in the early '60s.)

I thank all librarians for saving restless teens like me and the New Yorker publishing corporation for maintaining the magazine since its inaugural issue in 1925, especially since so many other magazines have died.