The Timepiece and the Flea
One of life’s special gifts is the sense of awe and wonder we can feel about the world around us. As I have grown older, and presumably know more, I’m surprised, humbled, and quite often amused by what I still don’t understand – and perhaps never will. The subject of my wife’s relationship with time is one of those mysteries that give me consternation, joy and a humbling appreciation for the mysterious.
She never knows what time it is, whereas I always do. She carries no watch and never has. I have mine on my wrist as the backup to the clock on my cell phone. She, of course, has a cell phone that tells time, but it sits in our laundry room and is never consulted (and almost never answered either). While I use the digital timer on our microwave multiple times a day, she resorts to this only if essential, and then ignores the irritating (to me) beep after beep after beep when the timer hits zero. Our three thermostats always show the time, in case I’m curious as I move from room to room. My guess is that she doesn’t even know they show the time. She has no clock on her nightstand whereas I have one whose digital numbers are large and bright enough to serve as a nightlight.
Yes, I know that people are different, but here’s what makes this even more fascinating. She has a beloved cuckoo clock, a mantel chime clock, and an antique German pendulum clock. It’s not that she uses them to find out what time it is; she just likes having them around for the sights and sounds they offer. Of course, they rarely agree on what time it is (which drives me a bit crazy), but so what? In addition, she has three sand timers (two for five minutes (she likes the difference in their design) and one for twenty.
That’s inside the house. Our car, of course, has a digital clock. I always adjust it to agree with the time stated by the car’s radio. But I really should not waste that effort because when daylight savings time ends in the fall, she insists that I leave the hour as it is. So for nearly five months, I have to subtract an hour every time I want to know what time it really is. She delights in this, of course. And speaking of daylight savings time . . . every time it starts or ends, I tell her when we wake the next morning that it is, say, 7 am and I hear (in the spring) “well, it’s really 6 am.” You can figure out how this plays out the first day of standard time in the fall.
So, you may think, her (to me) cavalier attitude about time must cause her problems at least sometimes. To the contrary, she is never late for an appointment or to meet me. She never misses a plane or a train (though if I am travelling with her, I insist on being there VERY early). And if she has to make, say, an early morning appointment, she wakes up well in time even though on any other day she would still be sleeping. How is that possible?
In the evening, she takes her bath and goes to sleep when she feels tired. This is, of course, a very healthy approach, compared to mine where, when I feel tired it is almost always within a five-minute window of 9 p.m. She wakes up when she’s slept enough. For me, that is nearly always 5 a.m., whether I’ve had a good night’s sleep or not. And whenever she is curious about what time it is (which is not often), she just asks me, her walking biological timepiece.
Please don’t read this as a negative comment on her indifference toward time. I actually admire her because, you see, she lives in the moment. What time it is, was, or will be or what we have to do and when just too often gets in the way of appreciating now. When we first dated, she shared some of her poems with me. I remember two lines from them some 57 years later. “There is no tomorrow,” was the first one I came across. This was not a ploy for sex (I don’t think). And the very next poem contained this line: “I love the mystery of tomorrow.” Huh??
In 1974, Lewis Thomas, the American physician, poet, etymologist and essayist, wrote The Lives of a Cell. The book is a beautifully written reflection about how much we know, misunderstand and have yet to learn about life in all its forms – and how interconnected all forms of life are. Among his observations is this one:
“The culmination of a liberal arts education ought to include, among other matters, the news that we do not understand a flea, much less the making of a thought.”
That sums up pretty well my ignorance about my wife’s relationship with time, a gap in my grasp of the universe for which I am as perplexed as I am thankful.
Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell
