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Category: time

Tea Timed

Tea Timed

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The roil and hiss of the electric tea kettle is the sound of morning. Even the parakeets know it. Their first precious chirps of the day are when they hear this sound.

But the old electric tea kettle has seen better days. Used to be, you’d fill up the sleek polished steel container, flip the switch, and before you had time to do a few stretches or run upstairs and splash some water on your face, it would be ready.

But tea kettles wear out, like everything else. It will still do the job; you just have to baby it a little. Turn it in its casing until you hear it engage, like a safecracker jiggling a lock.

In the end, the water is just as hot, the tea just as bracing. Maybe even more so.

Leaving in the Dark

Leaving in the Dark

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Once again it’s dark when I leave for work and light when I return. This happens every year when we “spring forward,” and every year I note the change.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy the long evenings — though long, frigid evenings are not exactly what I had in mind.

It’s more the shift of expectations. Can I still come home, pull on comfy sweat pants and veg out? Not so easy when it’s light till 7:30.

On the other hand, leaving in darkness has always signified seriousness of purpose. It’s the departure hour for early-morning flights and important interviews.

I feel so virtuous pulling out of the driveway with only moonlight and porch light to guide me. It’s like I’m getting a jump on the day — even though it’s no earlier than I left last week!

Warp Speed

Warp Speed

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At some point in my young life I decided that busyness was a key to happiness. I don’t remember making a conscious decision about this, but I do recall getting involved in one club or class after another. Why not join the choir, take modern dance, continue with piano lessons? Why not become a resident assistant in a dorm the same year I’m learning to be a high school English teacher?

Most of the time I could pull this off. Sometimes I made myself crazy. But life is seldom boring.

I write about this today because it’s one of those busy stretches when the amount of tasks to be completed make me dizzy. Most of these are work-related but there are a few personal ones thrown into the mix.

In fact, I shouldn’t even take the time to write this post. Too late now, though, it’s al… most … done!

(Seascapes can be relaxing when living at warp speed.)

Stop Time

Stop Time

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Ah, January. I know there must be something good to say about it. Let’s see …

January is a plunge into icy waters, a dive off the high board. That’s the bracing part of it, the embarking-on-a-new year part of it. 
January can be a brisk incentive, a long and relatively uncluttered month with time to get your teeth cleaned and update the will.

January provides plenty of inside hours for making soup and baking cookies. There’s hot chocolate and reading in bed when the snow is falling. 
But there’s one thing that January does better than any other month. It slows time. It’s the one month that takes forever to finish, that doesn’t seem like it’s over before it’s begun, that helps me catch my breath in this great, whirling craziness that is “midlife.” January stops zenosyne cold in its tracks. 
January Thaw

January Thaw

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The birds believe it. They are out in force this morning, robins and cardinals and crows. They are flitting from bare branch to bare branch, hopping up to puddles. Suddenly, there is water, something they’ve not had enough of this dry, frigid winter.

They, unlike humans, have not heard the weather forecast. They don’t know that this jig is up tonight when temperatures plummet from the 60s to the 30s (I think 30 degrees qualifies as a plummet … it will certainly feel like one).

So for today, just for a few hours, I’ll try to think like a bird, to pretend there is no future, no past, only a balmy wonder of a day with no breeze to speak of, just some light rain and not even much of that. In other words, a day — which is, in the end, all we’re ever given.

Time Travel

Time Travel

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Pale Blue Dot (Earth from Voyager 1, 1990) Courtesy NASA

As mentioned below, yesterday I posted in the past. Though it was strange for me, for time travelers it was just another day in the space-time continuum. That would be those who zip to ancient Babylon in a wormhole, or who believe in the Many Worlds theory, which posits that everything that ever could happen actually has — in another universe.

“We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked,” writes James Gleick in Time Travel, a book he penned in his past, my (then) future. “No one bothered with the future in 1516.” In fact, time awareness was dim until the 19th century, and the phrase “turn of the century” wasn’t used until the 20th.

But once we had temporal sentience we could have time travel: H.G. Well’s Time Machine and Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life — and scads of other books and films, including “Dr. Who,” the original of which debuted shortly after Time Machine was made into a movie.

What was most fascinating (but difficult to understand) was the physics behind the yarns, the fact that time travel, though it remains science fiction, cannot be totally ruled out according to some interpretations of the universe. Or, as Einstein said, “People like us who believe in physics known that the
distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

One might wonder why we need time travel in an age of cyberspace.  “All answers come down to one,” says Gleick. “To elude death.”

(This entry was posted in … the future.)

Auto Pilot

Auto Pilot

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It’s below freezing here with a sky that means business (snow business). Birds flit from feeder to roost, keeping warm, I imagine. That’s what I’d do if I were a bird.

Instead, I sit in a warm room observing my feathered friends, trying to work up the enthusiasm for a morning walk. Will the temperature rise past 32? That might trigger some movement on my part. Otherwise, I may have to sit a while longer, have another cup of tea.
Absent from the blogosphere for two days, I notice that the entry I thought I’d posted on Christmas Eve never published. Because I scheduled it for December 24, though, its time stamp makes it appear as if I published it on that day.
It’s a vote against auto-pilot … but a vote in favor of time travel. About which more will be said … in the future. 
To the Morning

To the Morning

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Thinking this morning of morning’s power, and of one of my favorite songs, which is about the morning. It’s by Dan Fogelberg, and was the opening song on Chicago’s WFMT when I lived there way back when, often the first sound I heard every day. Here’s how it goes:

Watching the sun
Watching it come
Watching it come up over the rooftops
Cloudy and warm
Maybe a storm
You can never quite tell
From the morning
And it’s going to be a day
There is really no way to say no
To the morning
Yes it’s going to be a day
There is really nothing left to
Say but
Come on morning
Waiting for mail
Maybe a tale
From an old friend
Or even a lover
Sometimes there’s none
But we have fun
Thinking of all who might
Have written
And maybe there are seasons
And maybe they change
And maybe to love is not so strange.

The Orchid

The Orchid

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One advantage of sitting near a bank of office windows is enjoying the plants the light makes possible. Look at this beauty, which has been blooming almost a month, it seems. I watched each papery flower emerge along the graceful stem.

The orchid’s owner received the plant several years ago when her mother died. Each bloom is a sweet reminder of her mother’s presence.

And now, because I know the story, the plant has greater presence for me, too, each day of flowering another bid for life. I’m pulling for the plant to live forever.

Civilized Pace

Civilized Pace

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Pre-dawn walks are becoming a habit. Made possible by early light, they remind me of early-morning runs when I lived in Manhattan. If I woke by 6:50 I could dash around the reservoir and be in the shower by 7:30 and on my way out the door at 8:00. By 9:00 or a little after I would be in my office sipping tea, nibbling a bagel and reading the Times.

No one arrived at McCall’s before 9:00 or 9:15 and no one bothered you while you read the newspaper — we were “looking for trends,” after all, so it was considered part of the workday. Ah, what a reasonable hour and civilized pace.

No one forces me to get in early now. It’s just the way I roll. But I like to remember a time when commuting meant hoofing it through Central Park, down Fifth, across 47th and over to Park.  Now that’s a walk!

(What I saw on the way to the office.)