It’s nine-twenty in the morning. I’m sitting on the porch of a cabin on a lake in rural Vermont. I am drinking coffee. At nine-thirty I hear a cockcrow nearby. Nine-thirty? This rooster is either a late riser or God didn’t impart to him the proper sense of time that roosters ought to have. Maybe he never learned to tell time. I know that some people never learn. It’s a common malady. I have relatives who seem constitutionally unable to show up when we’ve agreed on a time. They’ll say glibly that they lost track of time. I think they just like making an entrance.
Looking less critically, I can imagine that this rooster is a free spirit among roosters whose lives are constrained by tedious barnyard routines. For the rooster, servicing hens all day may not be as glamorous as we might imagine and may even become tiresome. This rooster is his own rooster, with a variety of interests and responds fully to what the moment presents him. He gives no thought for the morning much less the morrow. This rooster thinks outside the henhouse.
I’m of two minds about time; I feel a kind of muted admiration for anyone who doesn’t let the pressure of time dictate their lives. Yet, if I expect some person at two and he shows up at four, I’m irked. In the particular case of the rooster, I was simply expecting the rooster to crow at sunrise.
Life is all about time and how we use it.
I think of time and my thoughts drift toward old clocks and watches. I’ve accrued a few over the years. I have three old pocket watches: one, my great uncle’s, another my grandfather’s, and one, my father’s. I have another timepiece, my grandfather’s clock, a chronometer with bells that ring indicating the beginning and ending of a sailor’s deck watch. As long as I’d known my grandfather, the chronometer sat on a shelf next to his smoking stand. On his death, it was bequeathed to me. It stopped running soon after he died, a monument to the last watch he stood.
Is it just because I’m older that I think time’s changed its velocity and that fifty years ago time traveled about half the speed it does now? Yes and no. It may be scientifically unverifiable, of course, but it’s psychologically credible. I believe our lives were lived more slowly then than they are today. Our present cultural norm is not ‘steady as she goes,’ but ‘how far, how fast and put it to the floor.’ Zero to sixty covering a one quarter miles in 12 seconds is not just a hot feature in modern cars. It’s how we live
Once I left my car at the garage for an oil change; now it’s now jiffy lubed. Since we’re well into the fast food era, dining out offers a kind of accelerated experience. Eating out was once a production, a big deal, characterized by waiters who took our orders (curiously most wore black, like morticians), schmoozed us and then brought our order asking solicitously if everything was to our complete satisfaction. The experience was characterized by leisure. The entire affair was good for at least an hour, often more. In fast food restaurants, we can order, lets say a three course meal – burger, fries and coke – pay for and eat it, all in under five minutes. Few words are exchanged and the person you ordered from passes you the order while staring at a computer. Highly caloric, streamlined, but interpersonally, spare.
It’s a common practice in businesses, including the health care industry, to pack an employee’s time with so many tasks that it reaches critical mass. I remember talking to some nurses about their work. Men and women became nurses for the hands-on patient care that they found so rewarding. As health care becomes big business and economizes, employers increase the workload for the nurse without extending his or her hours. The endless administrative tasks limit the time the nurse spends with patients. Time, in the service of profit, gets placed on steroids.
My stepson and his wife, farm. She tends the chickens. After I heard the rooster crowing that morning I asked her what she made of it. She said she could speak only anecdotally, but she thought a part of a rooster’s habits are dictated by circadian rhythms, but not totally. As she has observed, her chickens, the younger roosters especially, are inclined to crow more often during the day and occasionally at night. Older ones crow less frequently, she observed, although she’s seen exceptions, like one old rooster who crows all the time. I’d also add, that one sees this among the males of our own species. As the book of Ecclesiastes counsels us, there is a time for everything under the sun. Not everyone gets it.
Before traveling to Vermont, on an impulse, I took an old watch to the jeweler to have repaired. It was the first watch I ever purchased. I bought it in New York City in 1960. Previous watches were graduation gifts. This watch was a Croton, a good watch in its day. Like many things old, when wound to go, it moved with determination, but slowly and at times barely made it through the day.
The jeweler looked at the watch, somberly, intently, like a doctor examining a patient. He concluded that my watch could be repaired. He quoted an extortionist price I might expect for the repair. It left me facing the great existential question about time that everyone dreads: just how much am I willing to pay to buy more time.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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