Time isn't on My Side, No it's Not

I note two weeks ago we began with friend Dave's consternation at not finishing books and ended last week with Siddartha's prescription for happiness.

Both involve time, that is, how, if you eliminate the linear time pressures of any endeavor, pleasure is increased.

You know those folks who leave the ballgame after the seventh inning stretch to avoid traffic? Didn't they miss seeing the Orioles come back last night in the bottom of the ninth? This is why we drive to Baltimore twice a year, stay in a hotel and walk to the park.

After watching The Pioneers of Television series over the past month, friend Larry and I came to independent realizations that everybody really cool is dead. The fact of the matter is Jack Benny isn't gone if we laugh the same jokes whenever we catch him on tv.

We can choose the time period in which we want to live.

For 8,000 guests at Buckingham Palace, two weeks ago, the AP reports, "Tea with the queen looked much the same as it would have 140 years ago when Victoria started the tradition: men in tails and top hats, women in floral dresses and elaborate hats."

I've chosen to live alot lately at the exquistively cosmpolitan Oxford of the Twenties as captured in Evelyn Waugh's description of a debate at the Union on Whether Civilization has advanced since this Society first met: "It is hard to give an accurate impression of this speech; every sentence of it had an unexpected form; every epithet was used; every agrument twisted obliquely from its usual significance or spun inside out."

For some, like friend-of-cousin Richard, whose dream it was to be a Bobby on a bicycle in an English village, the boring routine never met the ideal, his short attempt only providing a temporary way station. For us as well, as moods shift, we may easily shift time, place and era, by taking another book off the shelf.

For others, like Cyril Connolly, it's only after the key is unearthed that an ancient surprisingly contemporary naughtiness unfolds, as he recalls, "under the usual system of teaching Latin it was not possible for an ordinary boy to grasp the translation of anything he translates - but in my time there appeared another kind of translation - the Loeb classical library, which printed a prose version of the Latin besides the original - from that moment, several of us began to understand what we read and to find out that we had been learning the mature, ironical, sensual and irreligious opinions of a middle-age Roman whose chief counsel to youth was to drink and make love."

Something which usually signals the end of time, obituaries, can transcend instead, capturing small essences of town life, like: the woman born in 1910 on the family farmstead in Shenandoah County; an 87 year-old who delivered the newspaper for 45 years; or the fella who enjoyed 'building bird houses, his three dogs, and lending his opinion to others.' Our hometown rag, itself, was founded in 1885.

A recent New Yorker article on the consistency of cave art in Franch over two thousand years proposed, "a profound conservatism in art is one of the hallmarks of a classical civilization. For the convention of cave painting to have endured, the culture it served must have been deeply satisfying and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine."

Not so hard, really, to imagine in a town where Goolrick's 'Modern' Pharmacy is 141 years old and Crimonds has been selling shoes on Caroline Street since 1901.

Perhaps these are merely more reflections upon that which we've touched upon earlier concerning how we nest when we age so we might better remember where we last laid our glasses. Waugh, again, though, elegantly depicts something more, even a spiritual asepct, in, for example, how he admires "the way old people manage their lives. Like the founders of monastic orders they devote their thoughts to planning a harmonious daily routine."

There's a local artist who paints family portraits. Not ones, mind you, where a family dressed in formal attire stares uncomfortably ahead but pictures which capture the essence of their subjects. In the ad, a family is situated in a fictional Tiki Bar where Mom and Dad in Jimmy Buffet clothes smilingly cradle dacquiris, Sis is chatting up a surfer, and younger brother is jogging down the boardwalk. Mine might depict a contented bleacher bum sitting next to Groucho explaining baseball to the Queen.

Living beyond time is no more or less real than visiting intellectual landmarks at the time and place of your own choosing, or savoring familiar faces in the Communion line, come a bleak Tuesday, of those who clasped your hand on Sunday as they passed your usual pew on their way to the eternal altar.