It’s About Time
Just where has the time gone?
My watch broke, was judged unrepairable and I’m not replacing it. I don’t want a new power watch as I do not seek power. I don’t want a watch smarter than I am, another device on which to play Whack-A-Mole with nags and notifications while micromanaging an exercise plan and measuring my time in digital increments. Better to track the hands of time, the placement of Mickey’s white gloves, which, being a baby boomer, I know how to read. In England, schools are removing round tick tock clocks with big and small hands from classrooms because kids haven’t been taught to tell time.
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Fact is, I don’t want to be a slave to time anymore, especially digital time.
Sometimes my body tells time for me. My circadian clock, based on sunlight, regulates my hormones – bless them – and my sleep, unless I have just landed in Bangalore.
Sunrise and sunset, the moon and stars, and roosters crowing were the clocks of old, telling us when to harvest and hunt, when life wasn’t about sitting on our arses and staring into our smartphones. Water or mechanical clocks were their logical successors, ordering us to work or pray.
I like round, tick tock clocks because they still put time in perspective. I still see 5:30 as half-past-five and 5:45 as quarter-to-six. 12 is either midnight or midday. I can tell which.
Medieval contraptions put the moon, stars and heaven in perspective, revealing our minuscule place in their vast universe. Oh, we forgot poultry: The Strasbourg Astronomical Clock had a robo-rooster that flapped its wings, spread its feathers, opened its beak, stuck out its tongue, and marked noon by crowing in honor of Jesus Christ.
In the late ’60s, I worked in television and clocks from the Self Winding Clock Company of New York were the standard of accuracy. These mechanisms also kept trains running on time. The most famous one still sits atop of a kiosk at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Donald Trump has knock-offs in front of his properties. An electric motor rewound the springs once an hour. Western Union telegraphed a signal from the US Naval Observatory to reset the clock, causing it to grind and the second hand to shudder and move backward or forward. I carried one on those 60 Minutes-style stopwatches so I didn’t go blah blah blah for too long. I still have it, stored next to my Weber grill, good enough to time a burger. I certainly don’t need strontium atomic clock, correct to within 1/15 billionth of a second per year. Sometimes I just need to boil an egg.
Maybe time should be viewed on a straight-line, a bar of some sort, as Time Marches On, unless you are a conservative politician or exist, as NASA might say, in a parallel universe where time goes backwards.
For me, with feet firmly planted on earth, the world keeps on turning and what goes around, comes around…and around…and around.
Sad to note that The Doomsday Clock is now down to 90 seconds before midnight. Hopefully it will self wind and correct.
