Changing times

I know...that's the buzzword for these odd pandemically disordered days, but it's not what I have on my mind right now. 

Today is my mother's birthday.  She's been gone ten years now, though it hardly seems that long ago we were at the shore together, having started out on our annual journey there, and, in a matter of days, suffered her loss.  My aunt Sadie, her youngest sister, called just now to say she was remembering her, and we talked awhile about where everyone was, and how times change.

What zinged that phrase for me, though, was her beginning apology, "Oh, I just looked at the clock and didn't realize what time it was.  Are you in the middle of your Sunday dinner?  I could call you back later."  

The clock said 12:15 and in half an hour she was to get herself ready to go up to the communal dining room for her dinner.  So she had in mind that I, too, would be setting out a Sunday dinner for myself, right on time.

As it happens, I had just finished my lunch...tuna salad and almond bread...though usually I do have my largest meal (if one can bend the definition a bit) at noon. Unless, like tonight, the boys are coming for dinner.  Eating mid-day is better for health, but frankly my reason is that I'm mostly too lazy by evening to put together anything more serious than leftovers or a higgledy-piggledy snack.  It's partly living alone and partly my energy level that peaks by ten am and practically shuts down at four.  If I know a real evening dinner is nigh, I try to have it done mostly by mid-morning.

What keeps echoing at this moment, though, is my aunt's timeless assumption that midday Sunday dinner still holds true.  Once upon a time, that was our tradition.  Sunday dinner meant a full complement of a meal, no rush, an afternoon to settle it.  Somewhere, someone still does that, I am sure.  But lives change.  Times change. Meals change character.  We are elsewhere, doing otherwise, caught up in different patterns of a week.  Sometimes, one day is very much the same as another.

There must come a point at which, after decades of changing times, we, like my aunt, go back to seeing life reflected in earlier times.  I find myself doing the same.  Though I am long retired from school, both as student and as teacher, I still feel Friday as the week's end, and the weekend ahead as the breathing time.  Sunday night, I catch myself thinking, oh, if only it were only Saturday again.  Yet for my days, there is little change between M-F and the precious open hours of the weekend.

Today, for instance, Sunday, already I have felt time's hoofprints on my back.  Why?

There is something I must confess here...Time is my nemesis, and always has been.  Time, that invention of some frightfully left-brain person still running from the dinosaur era, runs counter to the rhythms I run on.  My body does not adjust easily to time, particularly in those spring-fall changes.  Its metric system is its own.  (Stories tell that my great-grandfather, an engineer, refused to go along with those seasonal manipulations.  I envy him.)

Though the calendar upsets it far less than the clock, I would be glad if one day ran into the next, if my daily to-do lists did not have to have a particular day stamped at the top, if Monday felt like Saturday, if the day I didn't feel like doing some art or attending an appointment or digging in bulbs (well, I used to) could be as easily shifted without fuss to another moment in time. I'm not talking about procrastination, but inclination...I'm likely as not to be early as late.  So why not give up, and live on my own time?

But that would be chaos, you, shocked, are thinking.  How would you organize your social interactions? Well, there could be compromise, I suppose.  After all, a little chaos never hurt anyone.  It's the way the world began, it's the beginning of any sort of creative endeavor.  It's the way we learn to swim.  So why not?

To all these whys I have no answer.  I think of a line in a movie (I can't think which) in which one of the characters asks another why he thinks he has the nerve to do some awful thing, and the other responds, Habit.

Even having done nothing horrendous except blindly follow out the 24-7-12 agenda, I answer the same.  Habit...the cage I live in. 

I am going for a walk now, not because of the time, but because the day is fair and I need to breathe.

As the year ends, the calendar shifting us once more, we all need some fresh air and a break, even if temporary, from the Habit of Time...

I wish it for each of you.