I’m a Time Study Man

I used to hate when people complained about not having time to do something. It seemed like an excuse: no one has trouble making time to dick around on Facebook, but suddenly there’s no time to read or go to the grocery store? 

But as I get older and collect responsibilities that I can’t shift around as easily, I’ve become more empathetic. Lately, with a puppy and more professional obligations, finding the time on weekday mornings to write—without the pressure to do more than stare at my computer and be in the space of whatever it is I’m working on—has been challenging.

To compensate, I’ve resigned myself to missing out on early morning weekend adventures. I can only seem to write before lunch, and it’s become a weird truth that I’d rather write one perfect paragraph before noon than do just about anything else. When I miss out on these outings, it’s not because I don’t have time, it’s because I’d rather be writing.

Even if I won’t be going on a day hike tomorrow, I realize this is one of the least obligated times of my life. Which is why I had some compassion for a woman I came across on my run yesterday. The track near my apartment was empty except for two women, probably in their 40s, and a bored nine year-old girl looking on. The track is the most pleasant way for me to exercise with my dog, Rex. She can race around and sniff, and I can run without worrying about her racing around and sniffing.

I did my first lap between the women’s 400s, but once they started again, Rex began running alongside them. One of the women, I like to think the mom, said in the loud, under the breath way of a passive aggressive without any power, “A dog shouldn’t be on the track.” Fair enough, and I left because in her tone, she was saying, “This is my moment not to worry about emails, or my husband, or the laundry, and even then, I had to bring my child, and you and your dog are ruining this.” 

I felt bad, not for her disrupted 400, which to be nasty, wasn’t that fast, but for how little time she felt she had. Maybe I just felt bad for my future self, who one day will have a fuller life that I will try to escape in regular 90-minute increments to write. I hope that in those flights, I can be more at peace than that woman, but I’ll probably be just as anxious to do something with my bursts of freedom.

After the track incident, I took Rex to the park, and thought about the opening of “Pretty Hurts.” Like Beyonce, or her songwriter Sia Furler, my aspiration in life is to be happy. But more specifically, it’s not to worry about time or money. 

Until December 21

The only thing my dad seems to remember from high school is the longest and shortest days of the year. As facts go, these are a good pair to know. It’s not that Halloween, which is now less than ten weeks away, can’t be a marker of time coming and going, but there’s something more official about dates based in science. And besides, natural light, more than miniature candies, affects moods and plans. Light makes it easier to be outside, easier to get out of bed, easier to go for a walk after dinner for ice cream. Coming up to June 21, there’s a certain romance to the extending days, when each time the sun still hasn’t set feels like a gift.

June 21 should be my favorite day of the year, but I have a tendency to be sad about things ahead of time. While I did spend most of the evening of the 21^st enjoying the late-night lightness, I was already worrying about the shortening days. Still, for a month or so after the solstice, it was easy enough to pretend that the days were staying long. It was bright in the morning, and still light after the streets had quieted down. But now, in the last stretch of August, there’s no fooling. I’m waking up to write in dark skies and finishing my runs in twilight. 

Camus claims “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and so I try to find some joy in these shortening days. For most of the summer, I didn’t get to see the western light that fills my apartment in the hour before the sun sets; now I’m here when the great streaks of light inch along my wall. And even though it’s harder to get out of bed in the darkness, there’s a certain satisfaction to watching the morning begin. I feel like a witness to the day’s origin story.

These changes come every year, but somehow, they always surprise me. The shifting light is sort of like that second cousin who was once an idea, then a belly, then a person. Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the passage of time, but then the sunsets before 6 and that kid is in kindergarten. And sooner than you can believe, it’ll be December 21, and the light will start going the other way. Time, however, can only go in one direction: forward.

You Can Go Your Own Way

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortune may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, taken from the epigraph of Unaccustomed Earth

The other night, watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics at a friend’s house, another guest asked me how long I had been in Denver. “So not even a year,” she replied, which struck me as odd, even though it was factually correct. 

A year isn’t that long, sure. But I’ve been here this whole time, trying to figure out how to live and make friends in a city that until less than a year ago, I had never visited and where I knew no one who owed me anything. All that I had was an idea, stolen from Jhumpa Lahiri, stolen from Nathaniel Hawthorne, of striking my roots into unaccustomed earth. 

I might have known that an idea is not the same as a friend who’s not doing anything, but wants to know what I’m doing or even a crashable house party. There are times when I find myself, if not homesick, then acutely aware of where I would be if I hadn’t left New York. Some of my friends rented a house in Woodstock this weekend; I’m sure I would have had a great time. 

I’ve never regretted my decision to move to Denver. Like Hemingway’s idea of love, there is no choice anymore. I live in Colorado. Still, there are lonely times, when I wish I had one more person I could call or a place where the udon soup always put me in a better mood. While wanting these things, it’s easy to forget that my new life isn’t even a year old. I know I’ll look back on this time as a transition, but meanwhile, I have to live it. And unfortunately, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, there is no remedy for time but more time. 

But there are many moments when moving on an epigraph makes sense. Every time I parallel park successfully (which is not every time I parallel park) and sometimes when I ride my bike along streets no one I used to know has ever walked along, I feel proud and also free. Last weekend, I’m not sure what I would have done in New York. Probably something fun to escape the heat and maybe a party where I would have known all the guests for too long. I couldn’t have predicted a year ago what I ended up doing in Colorado: mountain biking and then going to a house show where the band played Side A of Rumours. But there are still more friends to make, a set of Colorado license plates to be acquired and hiking trails to learn. In short, there is still more time to pass.

After the Race

For the past few months, my mom and I have been looking forward to this week. On Tuesday, she got a new hip. On Sunday, I will run my first marathon.

There are staples running along her right side, but she’s doing fine and can still wax metaphysically.  When I visited her yesterday, she said, “I had March 22 in my head for so long, I’m not really sure what comes next.”

I feel the same way. For the past 18 weeks, this race has entered my head one way or another. And two days following the race, I’m going to Portland for a week. I must have thought I would just fall off the calendar after the marathon and my trip, because the rest of spring feels distant. Plans for mid-April feel a dream.

Until spring feels real, I recommend the Haruki Murakami short story “U.F.O. in Kushiro,” reprinted in this week’s New Yorker and also available in the short story collection After the Quake.