Time

I

Summer is waning, yellow school buses pick up and drop off students, evenings happen earlier, and the Red Gravenstein apples are ripe. Despite loving Gravensteins I'm not ready for the Apple Orchard. Walking among the apple trees means I've capitulated to autumn.

It's easy to fool myself about holding Fall at bay. I'm still wearing shorts, my arms are bare and my toes wiggle unencumbered in my Teva sandals. Thwarting the turn of the calendar is easy--it just requires a refusal to accept the inevitable. We do that all the time.

When I turned thirty I collected thirty white stones at Race Point Beach in Provincetown. As I placed each stone in my pocket I recollected the year--either my memory or a family story. Recollections--past tense.

Time, fickle and relentless, expands or contracts the same hour. Wait for a response and the seconds elongate and echo. The clock dispenses minutes with a frugal hand.

We need to know the time. Contemporary life is time regulated. As soon as civilized life became complex people wanted to organize their day into time segments.

Obelisks, with their changing shadows, sliced the day into morning and afternoon. Later— markers around the base segmented time into narrower slots.

Now we measure ultramicroscopic parts of seconds.

Could people be satisfied with an outdoor sundial, save in the garden? No.

Once the Egyptians perfected a more portable timepiece it started the quest for smaller portables. Our digital timepieces parse our live into microseconds.

Personally I am fond of water clocks--clepsydras. "These were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. Other clepsydras were cylindrical or bowl shaped containers designed to slowly fill with water coming in at a constant rate. Markings measured the passage of hours."

I imagine standing in front of a water clock, mesmerized by the passage of time. Do I want to watch the water disappear or appear as the measurement of elapsed time? Either way the inaccuracies of such a device bothered minds now focused on capturing the passage of time--precisely.

Did anyone scoop out some water to delay an odious task or add some water to hasten time? Who hasn't set a clock ahead? What happens to the minutes you bypass?

Chess players in Harvard Square keep turning over a small sand timer to keep play moving. No time to procrastinate--know your moves.

New England Puritan preachers not only delivered hell and brimstone sermons but also placed an hour glass on the pulpit to time their two-hour Sunday sermon.

Queen Victoria, obviously upset by long sermons insisted that an eighteen-minute glass be set on the pulpit in her church. The local newspapers interpreted the timer as an indication of the Queen's displeasure with extended rhetoric.

My mother used a three-minute timer to cook soft-boiled eggs for my father.

We record our days in daily diaries, in journals, and with photos. My first diary came with a small key and tiny lock. "Dear Diary" I wrote, "today I am seven years old."

Did I tell the diary about my whole day? Did I admit to stepping on the line when playing hopscotch or just say I played hopscotch and won? In a few weeks I tired of the diary.

II

October 2007
The New York Times wrote a story about the Reverend Robert Shields. The good reverend spent twenty-five years "chronicling his life in five minute segments." He recorded every aspect of his life, even his visits to the lavatory.

"Dear Diary, it's Sunday, August 13, 1995...

7:25-7:30 I sprayed, and puddled and piddled and widdled”

He only slept two hours at a time so that he could record his dreams.

When Rev Shields died he left a 37.5 million-word document that fills 91 boxes.

"Mr. Shield’s words apparently exceeded the more than 21 million in the colorful diary of Edward Robb Ellis, a newspaperman who died in 1998, and the 17 million words of Arthur Crew Inman, a reclusive poet who died in 1963. The 19th century London diary of Samuel Pepys was a mere1.25 million words."
New York Times October 29, 2007

Rev Sheilds gave his diary to Washington State University. The terms: The diary can't be read for fifty years or subject to a word count.

"What seems certain is that Mr. Shields believed that nothing truly happened to him unless he wrote it down." Once he started in 1972 he couldn't stop. He said, "Maybe (historians) by looking into someone's life at that depth, every minute of every day, they'll find out something about all people."

Time captured on paper or on a blog—an assurance of how time was spent, our thoughts and ideas.

Half a bookshelf contains my journals-- not daily doings, but thoughts, readings, and recollections.

According to the Guinness World Records a Colonel Ernest Loftus of Zimbabwe kept a 91 year daily chronicle of his life (1896--1987).He began at the age of twelve and continued until his death July 7, 1987. Age--103 years 178 days.


In January I received a gift of a five-year diary. Each page contains enough room for five years of that date. An inch and a half makes for a terse discourse.

Or use the Internet to keep an electronic diary of days. Then you can go back in time by clicking FIND.

III

Summer is fading, but today it's 80 degrees and I am experiencing time hanging back and refusing to enter autumn.