The Spouse bought me a new watch battery and it came with a lifetime guarantee. Isn’t that strange? But he reminded me that
I already have a cast iron pot with a lifetime guarantee. And marriage, too. How’s that for promises? He knows how to make me smile.
I slipped my watch around my wrist and listened to its now constant tick.
These days, our daughter is sporting her own brand new, rather grown-up watch. It was a perfect birthday present from her grandparents. She loves its real leather strap and the tiny window that reliably shows the date. When I was her age, I had a very similar watch but, unlike hers, mine needed to be wound. I used to think that I needed to make an effort to make time go. A very adult responsibility.
Maybe summer is a natural time to think about time. These are the long, lazy days that slip past all too quickly, and the short fire-lit nights that we will remember when the weather once again turns cold. These are also days to measure against days past. What has changed since last summer? What have we gained and what has slipped away with time?
Over the millennia, we’ve wrung out our imaginations developing new ways of measuring time. Possibly the oldest account of a sundial comes from the Old Testament king of Judah, Ahaz, who measured the passage of the sun against a set of stairs. The Babylonians, the Greeks and later the Romans all used sundials—the hemicyclium, the arachne, the antiboreum—but come a cloudy day, these were just clever paperweights.
Medieval churches throughout Europe used candle clocks. Early models relied on many candles of the same size, and later carefully graduated candles took their place. Time, then, was measured out in spent light. In ancient China, incense clocks were used and proved an accurate method because they had no flame and so the wind could have little effect.
The Bible measures time in generations. Which is beautiful but reliable. Biblical generations are wobbly. In some books, three-score-and-ten sets the pace, but in others those biblical lifespans expand. Isaiah, Moses, Abraham and Sarah all stretched well into their new century, and Methuselah’s 900 years boggle the mind. All these biographies complicate historical readings of the Bible. When we consider lifespans and generations like those, the Bible becomes theological poetry, maybe history rewritten as myth. We can read it as reality shot through with a beautiful sense of exaggeration that opens us up to incomprehensively abundant grace.
Back in May, the world’s oldest person died in New York City. Susannah Mushatt Jones lived to be 116 years old. Now the title is held by Emma Morano-Martinuzzi, who is just a few months younger than Miss Susie was. She credits her own long life to eating three raw eggs a day and being single. Think I’d rather not. The Spouse’s poached eggs are far too good.
But maybe we need these chronological giants for perspective. They might teach us that life may be long but time is short. It folds in on itself as generations overlap, much to our joy and (parental) exhaustion. They show us that our lives can coincide with all manner of wisdom.
Crows can live to 20, remembering faces. In South American mangroves, macaws can live to 80. Bowhead whales live beyond 200—which means that there are whales in our Arctic this summer that predate Canada.
We each have our span of summers. Each begins with sticky buds and the surprise of flowers, then stretches out into these long days, wet or bright, warm or chilly, eliciting delight, disappointment, nostalgia. When I was a kid, I spent my summers at camp and the woods of Quebec became the assumed backdrop for every wilderness story from the Bible to Peter Pan to every single Trixie Belden adventure. I never wanted to go home. If only
I could stretch time and stay here forever. Standing around the campfire, under the star-marked sky, the final verse of Amazing Grace brought the shivers I am still feeling now.
“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,
we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
than when we’d first begun.”
