Time

Every year is getting shorter. Never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to or nought a half a page of scribbled lines. Hanging on in quiet desparation is the English way. The time is gone. The song is over. Thought I'd have something more to say. -Pink Floyd

Every watch that I have ever owned has always been a gift from the Docta.

After we had feasted on crusty bread, pate and slivers of gorgonzola, a picnic the Docta spread out on the floor of my dorm room, he gave me a small box. I hadn't expected a gift from him since this was our first Christmas together. Inside the box was a watch simliar to the one below, a sun and moon dial that changed faces from day to night.
The sun and moon will always rise for you... he told me.
He went on to say that he had agonized, as he always does, over whether to buy this particular one and whether I'd actually wear it.
I wore it everyday till the leather band cracked apart and the battery went dead.


A couple years later I lost the second watch he had given me during a snowstorm on a midnight walk to Packard drive. Although our destination was only a few short blocks away from the Docta's apartment, we spent hours skating down slick walkways, making snow angels, and throwing snowballs till we were red cheeked cherubs. That night we sat around in big fuzzy socks taking turns sipping ramen noodle soup straight out of the pot. We never found that watch.
During those years it seemed that everything in my life was held up against clock time - my college courses: Korean politics lecture 1.5 hours, Botany lab in the Botanical Gardens across town 2 hours 15 minutes, the lunch shift at the Law Quad 3-6 p.m. my summer job filing medical claims for discharged soldiers 8-4, My first year as a teacher, 90 minute block periods and the brutal start time 7:45 a.m., Pregnancy: 9 months, Labor and delivery: 11 hours, the G's nap times from three naps to two naps to one.

Last night the Docta returned from a weekend with his parents in Santa Cruz. He could hardly wait to give me the package he had bought on his travels.




I bought it because it reminded me of the first watch I gave you the one with the sun and the moon.

I put it on my wrist staring at the two windows and the outline of a crescent moon.

Where is that first watch? Suddenly it was important to me that I find it. I pulled out every jewerly box, looked inside every cosmetic bag.
In my search, I found the other ones he had given me...

The ones that marked time in other phases of my life, our life.

16 years of clock time.

I guess it makes sense that this first watch is no longer to be found because Time means something entirely different for me now. The hours, the minutes the seconds no longer matter as they did back then when I was just enduring or living for the next break, the elusive good time.

Does time really heal all wounds? Does time really give us perspective and if so how do we know we've attained it? If we are waiting to answer a question that has no definitive answer how do we know it has been answered? I know this much you cannot determine in hours how long it will take you to heal or the exact hour you will be ready to forgive someone. I'd like to put those dates on my calendar but I know it would be fruitless.

I've been thinking a lot about time, about moving towards eliminating time altogether. "the psychological time which is the egoic mind's endless preocupation with past and future and its unwillingness to be one with life by living in alignment with the inevitable isness of the present moment."

This watch the Docta has given me with its abstract windows and numberless faces is the perfect reminder for me of the duality that time holds for me, that all we've got is time and yet time is nothing more than a "surface layer of reality."