Thursday, October 15, 2009

Time

We recently had the pleasure of hosting three of my wife's cousins for five days, women who I'd only met very recently. There's a whole collection of stories in those five days, but what triggered this post was reading Observational Time with John Goodman.

One of the cousins asked for an alarm clock for the day they were flying out and I realized how long it had been since I used one. She was surprised when I told her that basically I got up when the dogs woke me, and said "So you don't have a schedule?"

I said "no, I guess not", but realized later that the right answer is: "yes, it just doesn't involve machines". Between the light coming in the windows and the dogs' sense of, well, hunger and wanting to go relieve themselves, we have a pretty predictable schedule, appropriate to our lives.

So "time is ... an art of observation" -- yes, I'll second that.