Time meant to be enjoyed, not merely recorded

The wall clock read 9:52 for months. It typically told us when to finish breakfast so as to get to school on time, and when to finish dinner so Dad wouldn’t be late for choir practice. With school an eat breakfast while zooming affair, choir practice cancelled, and no one coming for dinner, I didn’t bother resetting the clock. I’ve always resented the get somewhere, be somewhere, constant reminder; leaving it frozen perhaps my way of defying that imposition.

Marking and measuring — what there is of our days: what’s gone, what’s gained — humans have been taking stock since literally the beginning of time. Lunar

cycles were carved on bones and cave walls some 30,000 years ago; for 6,000 years we’ve measured hours and calendared months — systemic time created initially and primarily to organize food.

When I was young my parents made sure we sat down to dinner nightly at 6:00; I’ve struggled to replicate that in my own iteration of domestic life. I feel guilty about it, but when everyone works late, and with all the extracurriculars, it’s easier to take- out. This year — nothing but time, homegrown veggies, and too many eggs on my hands — I found my inner cook. She’s not half-bad and a lot less expensive. We still aren’t great about sitting down around the table, but as my daughter pointed out we aren’t exactly lacking in family time lately.

Usually bustling with school, activities and friends, my tween has been forced instead to hang out with her mom. Oh my goodness, what a gift these hours and days and months of proximity. I’m discovering who my child is as she moves into adolescence, and for better and worse, who I am as the mother of a new teenager. I am selfishly grateful for this stolen year with her.

She and I read “A Christmas Carol” over the holidays, and in that timeless classic Dickens writes, “It is a fair, evenhanded, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humor.” Needing more such elucidation, I pulled “A Tale of Two Cities” off the shelf. I was rewarded with the reverie on

Monsignor during the French Revolution — it’s devastatingly current. Dickens is rich, requiring time to digest. My father recommends one a year; sound advice I’ll follow.

With family visits moved outside, we’ve spent months following Dad around the side streets and backroads of Paradise. Past caution tape and beyond no trespassing signs, we’re exploring the town where he and I both grew up. Time is layered there, viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens of childhood memories from the 1950’s and 80’s, overlain with ashen Camp Fire trauma, and the future rising with the daffodils as construction builds out of the scars.

There seems to be a springtime shifting now. Maybe the not-too- distant future holds again the need to know when to finish things up and get to things. Deciding I’d best reset the clock, I found I’d left it too long unattended, and the back had rusted out. Thinking of replacing it with something modern, I visited The Watchman, and came home with a cuckoo clock instead. A playful piece, painstakingly hand-carved and operated entirely by gear mechanisms, it reminds me that time is better viewed, not as a utilitarian necessity, but as a treasure to enjoy. Stop and listen, it says. Don’t rush, it says. Linger over good food, read meaningful books, take walks and talk, learn about the people you love. Spend your precious time wisely, it says.