December 31, 2007
Mañana
I have three old clocks, the wind-up kind, and I have an obsession about them that in spite of their age they keep reasonably accurate time. Not Naval Observatory time like when we flew over the Pacific, though that would be nice, but close enough that the two that chime, chime within seconds of each other, preferably simultaneously.
Maybe it’s New Year’s Eve that brings this to mind. For this is the worldwide grand moment of timekeeping when the entire planet takes notice with clocks and calendars. Only a few years ago on Y2K there was universal angst that we’d maybe never be able to do it again. Maybe one of our vocations as human beings is so that time never has to stop until we do. Time is not really running out, it’s just that we are running out of it. Time has really never run in for it never was off stage, waiting, if our notion of the Big Bang amounts to anything. Maybe the universe is one big clock, but so far as we know we may be the only ones who know it. We keep time as if we think we’ll never have to give it away, and you’d better believe it. We are the town criers. And the cosmos very patiently lets us think it’s important that we are. “Wait for me,” we shouted as soon as we could talk. One of my handy word books says that time comes from ti, meaning to stretch, meaning also more or less, the fit time, hence, the good time, prosperity, as in Let the good times roll. The early word for everyday time was tide, like in Yuletide, glad tidings, high tide, low tide, and laundry soap. It took the Greeks to find kairos for fat time and chronos for thin time, the one always full of it, the other just sort of bammin’ along, again, waiting for something to happen. Guy Lombardo’s band’s yard-wide tremolo forever once brought in the new year in with Auld Lang Syne, “times gone by,” for which we all drank a cup of kindness yet, and then started up the violence again the next day in the bowl games. Mañana is really the rule of the day and especially of New Year’s Day. Iraq? Mañana. The environment? Mañana. Our international reputation? Mañana. The busted up church ignoring Jesus’s prayer that we all be one? Mañana. Mañana? Perhaps. If there is one.
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