40TW194

Foreword

It’s only appropriate to write a blog entry about time after having been away from ‘The Fence’ for so much of it.  I’d like to say that I did my best over the last few months, but in truth, I really didn’t.  There were lots of opportunities to get new entries out, and no lack of material to cover, from social commentaries, world events, bizarre news stories, and just random observations (which are the most fun to write, by the way).  There was also a lot of the real world happening, which none of us can truly escape, and which can have a very restricting effect on how you spend your down time, if you’re fortunate enough to have any, that is. 

That’s the whole point.  Time is not free.  Time is money, and investing the majority of mine to make it is the crux of it.  Investing in what, you ask, time or money?  It could be argued either way I suppose.  It’s like Emily Haines’ observation in a great Metric song a while back, “buy this car to drive to work/drive to work to pay for this car”.  There is no doubt that time is fleeting while I’m teaching, especially at this point in my career where I work really hard to be not only effective in the present but attractive to rehire in the near future.  What I found—and I spoke of this in “Quit Stalling” back in September—is that after investing so much of myself into work, writing took a back seat.  Not like the back seat in your car, but more like the back seat of a bus. 

In my own defense, though, I did some writing in the interim.  I once found myself awake at 2am writing postcard fiction, composing as many as seven or eight odd pieces that both impressed and frightened me a little.  I’ve never been a postcard writer, although I’ve dabbled in it here and there, but never to my satisfaction.  These, as oddball as they turned out, are interesting, and completely abstract to the point that I question their effectiveness.  I’m still debating how or when they’ll be published, whether in the short- or long-term, or indeed if ever. 

I also spent a significant amount of time composing my year-end Top 20 Albums list, which functions almost like a blog all its own.  It nearly got posted to “The Fence”, since initially the blog was envisioned to contain my music blogging as well.  After a few entries, I liked where the Fence was going, and I’ve long-since closed the door on posting album reviews and lists to it.  They’re apples and oranges.  Perhaps a second blog for strictly music talk may be on the docket, but since I’ve had scant time to work on the first one, it seems foolish to think I could maintain a second with any consistency.  I have long-imagined a music blog called “From The Left Field” in which I just randomly choose album titles I enjoy and discuss their merits, but that remains a long way off.

In terms of “The Fence”, I have bits and pieces of about five different essays, three of which could arrive one-two-three, all in the same day.  I don’t like doing that though, because those who are kind enough to read my work shouldn’t be inundated with too much for one sitting.  I have an informal length for my essays, to keep them coherent (which doesn’t always happen, but arguably, therein lies the fun in blogging), but also to keep them digestible for readers.  Not that my readers couldn’t read more, it just seems more humane to limit how much I ramble.  I’m prone to ramble in person, so I can only imagine the tedium of a boundless written rambling would be.

I realize as I’m typing that I am rambling already, so I’ll wrap this part for now.  For archiving’s sake, suffice it to know that the next few blogs will be ideas culled from observations and ideas from as far back as early October.  They may or may not appear chronologically.  They’ll all see the light of day sooner than later.  Music writing is wrapped for the foreseeable future, and short of any future unscheduled middle-of-the-night postcard or poetry sessions, The Fence is back on for 2013.

“40TW194”, or “Time In A Bottle”

One thing we would all like to be able to do is maximize time.  We can’t invent more of it.  We can’t reclaim it once it’s gone.  We can’t even define it.  All we can surmise is that it is linear; we know it moves forward only, and by the means we have developed to measure it, we know it moves in even increments regardless of our perception of it.  There are times when we know it moves unbelievably quickly:  vacations, good television shows, lunch breaks come to mind.  Then there are those times that agonizingly crawl, to the point you almost feel like you’re suspended in time itself.  These are the proverbial ‘waiting for toast to pop’ moments, such as traffic lights, grocery store check-outs, banks, snail-mail, Tim Horton’s drive-throughs, or those last few hours before you can call it a day and head for home.  Of course, we all know that time by our own understanding of how time ‘works’, the minutes and hours are no different in any of these situations, but clearly there are times when we perceive time itself either quickens or slackens. 

In that last paragraph I used the word ‘time’ seven times, and pronouns in its place at least a dozen more.  Time defines us.  Our very lives exist because of it.  We define the success or failures of our lives by how we maximize the time over which it occurs.  About half of it is devoted to recharging our energy, via sleeping and eating specifically.  A significant amount of it is expended on work, or toil to maintain comfort for the remaining fraction we have for leisure. 

During the course of my day, typically I wake at 6am, spend the next hour preparing myself and the boys for our school days ahead, and that is before I even start the car.  I typically arrive in Minto around 8am, having spent the better part of an hour delivering my kids to daycare, waiting for my carpool, and making the transit to my work-place, which is farther than most I would imagine, but my reality nonetheless. 

My school day begins in earnest when I arrive, and ends anytime between 4 and 5 pm depending on the day and what my schedule permits.  There is no telling when meetings, clubs, or other unexpected things are going to happen, and occasionally there are evening events that could keep me at school until closer to my natural bedtime, which would otherwise be between 10 and 11pm, but those are few and far between.  Normally, I drive another hour to get home and retrieve the kids, before supper is prepared and consumed, usually by 6 or 6:30.  Two nights a week the boys either attend Beavers or Cubs, and on those nights, we could be home as late as 8 or 8:30pm.  I am fortunate that my kids are old enough to get themselves prepared for bedtime, otherwise I’d be committing even more time, and indeed it wasn’t long ago my wife and I did.  So, all told, between 6am and 8pm, my day is jammed.  Oh to be able to tack on a few more hours—I can’t even imagine how I’d use them.  There are at any given time half a dozen things I plan to do, should the opportunity arise.  Sometimes unexpected hours do materialize, just at the expense of others.  Snow days, for example, occur about three or four times a school year on average, and as of this writing, we’ve had a whopping one so far.  Happening the last week before Christmas break, it was a godsend for sure, but I found myself sleeping in late, correcting some math quizzes, and reading for (gasp) pleasure.  That day didn’t crawl, I guarantee that.

That’s why I find weekends are so valuable.  After so many years of working most Saturdays, I find that one of the great payoffs for becoming a teacher is that my weekends are mine.  Mind you, I still need to eat and sleep, plus I need to recuperate time lost during the week with my family, and any teacher worth their salt will tell you that weekends are optimal times to both catch up on grading and planning.  Short of calculating minutes and hours, which would be likely both handy and scary, weekends are no home run for slacking off time either.  Holidays, which include long weekends, Christmas, March Break, and the summer months are the real relaxation opportunities.  Don’t forget that there’s home maintenance, commitments to family and friends such as birthdays, anniversaries, social engagements, and the like.  There’s grocery shopping, banking (whether online or in person makes little difference), and any other miscellaneous errands we have to run.  Oil changes, garage visits, veterinarians, dentists, emergency outpatients, telemarketers we couldn’t dodge, unexpected visitors that never seem to drop by at convenient times…

What we come to realize is that time and all the ways we spend it defines who we are.  If you have too much free time, you’re not working hard enough.  If you have too little, you’re working too hard.  No one has the balance figured out.  Some of us have to work long hours to maintain the same comfort level of others.  Some worked hard earlier in their lives, only to have earned more free time later.  Some retire at 55, some 60, some never do.  Some even retire earlier.  Some never work at all.  Some, of course, are unable to, and their lives are arguably the worse for it given what prevents them from being able to in the first place.

It is remarkable then that we put such an onus on ourselves to define who we are with what scant time we have.  I define myself best I think by how I spend time with my family.  How I raise my children reflects what kind of father I am, and one day, was.  That’s one of the reasons we have children in the first place; we survive in part by how we pass on what we have learned to our offspring.  Genetics play no part of it.  Those who never have kids make their own impact on people around them.  My great-aunt left a tremendous impact on me, yet she never had children of her own.  People adopt all the time, and those children benefit from parental guidance the same way traditional child-rearing does.

Some of us want to live forever.  I for one do.  I’ve made no bones about it; I want to live a long time, partly because it’s natural for us to want to prolong our lives in the first place, but because I want to see how the future will unfold, for better or worse.  In my lifetime, I have seen technology unveiled that makes me giddy with anticipation at what’s to come.  Since the world didn’t actually end in December, I’ll still have to go to work, probably until my mid-sixties, and then the sky’s the limit.  I’m counting on science to advance exponentially, so any of my poor habits contributing to my equally poor health will be counter-balanced by those top-notch scientists we spend so much money funding figuring out a way to prop up my carcass far beyond the current life-expectancy of someone who uses too little of his current available time to exercise, or that time allotted to eating to choose better, healthier foods.  I also want to live long enough to see my kids grow into adults, make all the choices they will for better or worse, and to maybe one day welcome grandkids into our home, to lay on a beach with my wife while the grandkids run up and down the shoreline looking for beach treasures the way I used to (and still do when I find the time).

Every once in a while, if you stop long enough to notice, you come across news events or articles that give you a different perspective about time and what it means.  A few months ago, I stumbled across the story about a little carrier pigeon that was employed by the British government during World War II.  About a quarter of a million of these little feathered heroes were deployed during the European campaigns of war almost seventy years ago.  Many never reached their destinations, due to natural predators and other unexpected obstacles.  Most did, and it makes sense, because if more pigeons than not didn’t survive, they’d never use them in the first place. 

A nice couple bought a rather expensive townhouse in the ‘80’s, and after renovating a walled-in fireplace and chimney, discovered the remains of countless birds that had got stuck in the deep crevasses of brick and mortar.  It was a grizzly enough discovery, until they found a bird’s foot and leg with a tiny canister affixed to it.  The tiny, red cylinder, about the width of a Crayola marker cover, contained a small piece of paper with some strange coded letters, some of which weren’t even from the alphabet.  The obviously elated couple held on to their find, and a few months ago, finally decided to look into it.  They sent the remains and the note to the experts, and as it turns out, the bird was indeed a carrier pigeon with the designated code name ‘40TW194’ delivering a message of the highest importance from the front-lines to the MI6 offices only a few blocks from the home in which the couple found it.  The British government has since set about the arduous task of decoding the message, because apparently of all the possible codes it could have been are archived.  I’m imagining a big warehouse in the fashion of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  As you might expect, there have been no further updates, because apparently a seventy-year-old war memo is probably still considered a sensitive document.  For all we know it might have asked someone to water the plants.

Why is this story so compelling?  It seems this little bird managed to do something we all want so desperately to do:  it cheated time.  The bird’s own death didn’t even stop it from doing what it set out to do.  It flew home, got a bit lost along the way, but by the grace of unexpected outside intervention, finally accomplished its mission.  It has also come back to life, if even just for a little while.  And if someone digs up this blog years from now, little Forty-Tee will revive once again.  That’s the great answer to the riddle of time.  To live forever, you need to make your impact while you’re alive.  Of course, you can’t extend your own consciousness beyond your own life, at least for the time being anyway.  But you can make an impact on the world around you.  The first half of life is the one we live.  The other half is how people remember us after we’re gone.  We know this because it matters that we have grave stones, obituaries, things named after us, and other things that make up our ‘legacies’.  For me, writing helps fulfill that.  Raising a family, being a good neighbor, and even teaching children all fill that spot for me as well.  As much as I plan to live a good, long time, I know that eventually it will come to a close, and then the next half depends on how well I prepared before that time arrives. 

Some people make time capsules.  People throw messages in bottles into the ocean, hoping against all odds that someone somewhere will answer the call.  In fact, a bottle with a message that was tossed into the Atlantic Ocean from the New Jersey shore (there is a real place called that) was recovered on the coast of Ireland recently by a small child.  Imagine the excitement he felt reading a message that was sent several years earlier.  The content was irrelevant, but the message itself was an extension of the person who sent it.

As my Christmas vacation draws to a close, and the routines of everyday life begin again tomorrow, I find myself thinking an awful lot about my time.  The fact is, I have two fantastic kids, an amazing wife who puts up with all my idiosyncracies, and lots of stories to tell.  Even in the most pressing of times, I can do lots of things to create my own legacy.  I don’t need to build a time capsule.  I don’t need to litter the ocean with bottles, although that still sounds really fun.  After all of this meandering, I guess the whole point is carpe diem after all.  Until we learn how to actually control time, or even package it, we can only do our best.  And if you have a lazy day along the way?  Don’t worry, there’s lots of time.