January 26: Merton's Prayer, Battling Time, Poet of the Week, Sandra Beasley, "Holiday"

My God, I look at the creek.  It is the answer to Merton's prayer, "Give us time!"  It never stops.  If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek.  You don't run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You'll have fish left over.  The creek is the one great giver.  It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.  This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

Dillard is all about time.  The passing of the seasons.  Winter giving way to spring.  No matter how hard we pray, time is simply slipping away all the time, like the water at Tinker Creek.  The present, basically, is all we get.  The past and future are simply different versions of present-was and present-will-be.

Sorry about my absence last night.  Thomas Merton prays, "Give us time!"  That's exactly what I needed last night and tonight.  More time.  But the clock beat me.  At 11 p.m., I was brain dead.  I fell into bed and went to sleep almost immediately.

I've been battling time this evening, as well.  Time is winning.  It is nearly 11:30 p.m. now, and I know that, in a few hours, I will hear the plows come roaring up and down my street, throwing a good foot of snow into my driveway.  I need to get to sleep.

This week, I have chosen Sandra Beasely as Poet of the Week.  And tonight's poem is about Christmas, since we only have 333 more shopping days left.

Saint Marty is feeling the crunch.

Holiday

by:  Sandra Beasley

The tree is a spruce monster, refusing to fit--
so my father decapitates it with a handsaw.
We drape the body with tinsel before
he weaves in bulbs, their white and steady light,
and sneaks in his blinkers of blue and green.
This year there are strikes:  my sister refuses
to open her advent calendar until he sees a doctor;
my father refuses to see a doctor, popping Excedrin;
my mother votes for a cruise, her sister's house
anywhere she won't have to hang ornaments.
We thumb through her maps and clippings,
but it's that familiar silver that fills our palms,
tinsel we'll be picking from the carpet until May.
On the Eve we open one gift, make one toast, feast:
curried vegetables, green beans and bacon,
wine and more wine, always a knife sharp enough
to cut the roast of our hearts.  A lover said I've never
seen people trying so hard to make each other happy
manage to make each other so miserable.  Clearly, I said,
you do not understand the true meaning of Christmas.
Tonight we'll wrap gifts until dawn, alone
in our many rooms.  The house quiet except for
my father's cough; except for twenty-five chocolates
rattling behind twenty-five unopened windows,
except for my sister stringing up angels, in one hand
their tiny napes of neck and in the other hand, a hook.

July 26: The Clock, an Icicle, Dislocation of Time

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped.  Twelve!  It was past two when he went to bed.  The clock was wrong.  An icicle must have got into the works.  Twelve!

This little paragraph highlights something that has always fascinated me about A Christmas Carol.  There seems to be some sort of dislocation of time that happens throughout the course of the novel.  When Jacob Marley predicts the arrival of the three Ghosts of Christmas to Scrooge, Marley says that the phantoms will appear on three consecutive nights.  The first at one o'clock in the morning on the following night, the second on the next night at one o'clock again, and the third at midnight on the third night.  When Scrooge wakes up for the Ghost of Christmas Past, he becomes completely disoriented with time because it appears he has slept through an entire day into the night.

This time warp never gets that much attention from anybody.  Readers prefer to focus on the more ghostly elements of the story.  Time warps are the thing of science fiction and fantasy.  Scrooge is not Luke Skywalker or James T. Kirk.  He's a Victorian businessman who happens to have fallen into some kind of wormhole of the space/time continuum, past and present and future coexisting in one place.  Even the twelve nights of Christmas are compressed into a single evening by the Ghost of Christmas Present.

This time dislocation happens to most of us.  I have reached that point in the summer where I look at the calendar and say, "Where the hell has the summer gone?"  Time seems to fly by like a hungry bat chasing a mosquito.  Fall is looming, and I haven't even had my summer vacation yet.  I'm not ready for the leaves to start changing color, but in a few weeks, the green maples will start transitioning to yellow.  Time is passing.  Pretty soon, the Christmas holidays will be upon us again.

I'm particularly aware of the passage of time this summer because of my eleven-year-old daughter who seems to have blossomed into this young lady overnight.  She's still goofy.  She still watches cartoons and the Disney Channel, but in the last few months, she has become willowy and beautiful.  She doesn't sit in a chair anymore.  She lounges.  And she has a friend, who's a boy, who follows her around like Lassie followed Timmy.

I'm experiencing a dislocation of time.  I'm still in May, and it's almost the end of July.  In my mind, my daughter is still three-years-old, sitting in my lap while I read Charlotte's Web to her.  She's actually eleven-going-on-twenty and is starting middle school this fall.  I'm still in the 1980s, when I thought Cyndi Lauper was cooler than Madonna and mullets were never going out of style.  That's how behind-the-times I am.

Saint Marty needs to join the present. or he's never going to make it to the future.  Ahead warp factor five, Mr. Sulu.

Not too fast, Mr. Sulu