Some Oddities of Time

At the end of the day, the one thing we all need is more time. 

 

The café in which I work is open around the clock. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. We’ve got nothing but time. Which is why it’s kind of ironic that the clock on the wall doesn’t work. The levers frozen at 3:42. It’s been that way for almost as long as I’ve worked here, yet no one’s bothered to fix it. Not that it matters, we’re always open anyway. So, if you’ve got time to spare, so do we. 

Most people don’t stick around for long though. Actually, you’d be surprised how many people pass through in a day. They come, and they go, busy and bustling, hustling by, passing between errands and places unknown. Time keeps us all on our toes. We all have appointments to keep, people to meet and places to go; things to do and not enough time to do it in.

It seems we are always pressed for time in one way or another, which is why it does not surprise me how quickly time escapes us. It occurred to me once that perhaps if clocks counted backwards we’d realize how the hours count down throughout the day. Time is of the essence, as they say, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day, after all. 

Sometimes I wonder how a force so strong can be so invisible. How can people be so unaware of something so imminent? Perhaps if we had less to do, or if people took more time to take joy in simply doing nothing, we would notice how the days go by. Time is the great hassler, turning our lives into time lapses of responsibilities and deadlines to meet. Hours that turn into days and days that turn into weeks, and so, all too soon, life passes us by. 

But there are a few times a year when people become painfully aware of the passing of time. During the holidays for example; or when the first leaves begin to fall; when you wake up in the morning and the world is white; or when blowing out birthday candles that grow from a flicker to a burning flame too fierce to blow out in one breath. 

Other than holidays, birthdays, and the change of the seasons, the rest of the year we tend to believe that time never counts beyond its twenty-four-hour mark, always counting up to something that never seems to occur. But then we stand next to grown-up children, or catch glimpses of old photographs, and we are no longer fooled.  

You see, most people think time is constant; dependable; predictable; always the same. But those of us who really pay attention know that time is as varying as we are. Time is fickle and unreliable. And, just like us, time has its quirks and oddities. Even time can be dreary and lazy, at times. It can be eager and eccentric. Time can be exhilarating, and time can be aggravating, as oppressing as it is ambitious. Even time has its peculiarities. And, just like time becomes more palpable in moments when its fleeting, such as when you’re saying goodbye to someone you love, time changes its pace in some places. 

 

 

Take airports for example. Nowhere does the tempo of time march faster or with such impending velocity. Or consider how time works in classrooms, so tedious and lackluster. And then there are cafes, like the one in which I work, in which time stands still.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it’s always 3:42, and that’s not just because the clock doesn’t work. Cafes are timeless places. I would know. I work in one. 

And I think I’m not the only one whose noticed this peculiarity.   

There is an odd young man who used to come here for lunch. He always tucked his pants into his socks and wore the same brown bowler hat. I heard he was a business student, and so I’m sure he knew the pressure of deadlines better than most. He always sat in the same booth, in the corner by the window. And with feet outstretched, a unique pair of socks each day, he sat and mulled over his laptop, just passing the time, or rather, trying to escape it, almost as if he knew that his responsibilities would not find him here in one of time’s rare loopholes.

I used to not believe in destiny, but I also used to believe in the reliability of time. But a young man, as odd as time itself, proved that sometimes there is such a thing as being in the right place at the right time. 

Destiny walked in one rainy Thursday carrying a polka-dotted umbrella, her strawberry blonde hair dripping from the rain. There was nowhere else sit. All the seats were taken. 

The young man rarely sat alone after that. They sat together in his sunlit booth by the window all throughout the golden summer. He wrote on his laptop, and she brought stacks of books to read from a never-ending to-read list. They sat for hours sometimes, just savouring each other’s company, unaware of the frantic and frenzied people around them who, unlike them, were always pressed for time; or perhaps, simply less aware of its peculiarities.

 
There will always be those who come in here to “kill some time” before an appointment or when waiting for a bus; those who order a drink and maybe a dessert and glance impatiently at the clock that doesn’t work, slaughtering time instead of savouring it. 

 

Then, of course, there are those who are always running late, like the composed looking gentleman who is always flustered by the lateness of the hour. Perhaps he just hasn’t realized that the clock on the wall doesn’t work, or maybe he just has a bad sense of time in general, but he can never seem to catch up with it. He comes in once or twice a week to have lunch with a colleague and they chat till eventually he rushes off to some appointment or other. Maybe time just goes by faster for some people.

But just because cafes are timeless does not mean that time does not work its tolls here. Sooner or later, something always changes. Outside the café window rainy spring days become sunny summer days, and soon the first leaves of autumn begin to fall in one of time's most prominent moments. The girl with the strawberry blonde hair doesn’t come here anymore and the young business student sits alone, though he too doesn’t come nearly as often as he used to. 

Time is relentless, and, sooner or later, it catches up to all of us. But at least we have cafes, so remarkably ordinary in their timelessness. Every once in a while, when I see old friends reunite over coffee, catching up and reminiscing about the past when life was young and time abundant, I cannot help but think that perhaps they should have spent more time in cafes, savouring time and drinking coffee. 

Of course, there are also those who have more experience with times ability to fly by. Many of the retired folk come here to idle away their afternoons. People think they come for the free refills, but I know better. They come because they know that here time will not escape them. 

I told you that a man in funky socks taught me about destiny. Well, an old woman in chunky jewellery taught me how to savour time. 

It was the winter in which I first started working here, in this timeless café before I discovered its timelessness. It was December 24th, one of the rare nights of the year in which we close. The clock read 3:25, and I was just mopping up to close at four. The café was empty, except for a tiny old woman in a vibrant green and purple dress sitting at a table alone. 

I had never seen her before, but I have seen her many times since. She comes in most nights, wearing every piece of jewellery she owns, from pearly necklaces to emerald earrings. But on her left ring finger she wears only a simple golden ring, as if to heighten its importance. She never orders anything but coffee, decaf, which she sips quietly as she stares pondering out the window, dwelling on the past as she fiddles with her golden ring. 

I did not have the heart to ask her to leave, so I asked her if she was waiting for someone. “No,” she said, smiling up at me with kind old eyes and blush coloured cheeks. “I’m just making up for lost time.”  

 

 
I sat with her that Christmas eve. I was new in town. I didn’t have anything better to do. I would not have admitted it then, but I was pretty lonely, not just because I felt alone but because I felt abandoned; left behind by time, regretful of the years I had lost and the time I had wasted.

We laughed that night, me and the old lady dressed in emeralds and purple flowers. We drank coffee, decaf, and we talked about our pasts, starring out the window at the snow which drifted slowly down into the silent night. 

I didn’t notice it then, but the clock stopped ticking that night. Maybe it was the time we savoured, or maybe it just ran out of battery. Though, looking back now, something tells me that clock isn’t broken at all. Maybe it’s just enchanted.

Because at the end of the day, we all need more time: time to savour, to read a book, or catch up with a friend; time to ponder; to relish in the moments; and, maybe, to enjoy a cup of coffee.

Bird Watching

C.S. Lewis compared his writing process to watching birds. For Lewis, writing came to him in pictures. Ideas settled before him like sparrows. 

 

To me it seems a very vivid way to describe the process because it suggests that there is something at work that is beyond you; a silent sort of being that lives on a different schedule, in a world so secluded from yours, it is like another world entirely. Picture it: you sight a bird, the very image of an idea, once there, up high or down low, then gone with the rise of the wind, the sound or smell of invention still in the air. But the bird flies away, moving at a pace apart from yours, flitting in and out of contact with you.

 

 

 

The more time you spend in a place the more you get to know the birds that live there. You see them often enough, if you look out for them. Other than the spiders, they might be your closest neighbours, for they build their nests in your trees and on your rooftop. Like ideas, birds weave their way in and out of our lives, aloof and stunning, but sometimes they make close contact, such as when they don't know you are watching them from a window. 

 

I made rather close contact myself this summer, but without the glass, for I spent some time napping in a hammock strung from two trees in the middle of August. It was wonderful, for even as I drifted into a light sleep, I could hear the world around me, the wind and the sound of the lake more real than the sun streaked black behind my closed eyes. Yet my favourite part of the nap was the end of it when I would awake silently and the birds, wholly unaware of me, were all around me, living their secret lives as if still completely unobserved.

 

 

 

Like bird-watching, writing comes on a schedule wholly disconnected from your own daylight hours. It awakes long before you do, and so, it sees so many things you do not, for it knows the world before it awakens. Writing feels that way sometimes: Like the start of a day or a story in which no one yet knows what might occur, and so it meanders, flowing slowly into happenings. 

Like a desire for writing, birds come and go, adorning our lives with their needlework each time they appear, for even throughout the day, they move through all the unseen corners around you, passing in and out of sight, slipping into tree tops you never reach, hopping into the shadowy kingdoms under brush and root where only the small critters live. 

 

Yet as with birds and pictures for writing, some people simply do not notice them. They are just mundane enough to not interest some, feeling so like a day dream that many do not take the time to speculate. Many do not ask: What if this was part of a story? 

 

 

 

Lewis saw such pictures. As a young man he saw a Faun with an umbrella beneath a snowy forest. He knew the Faun was carrying parcels, and though Lewis did not know why, he thought it looked like a story. Today almost anyone shown a picture of Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow would be able to tell you where it came from. 

Still, it is important to remember that at one point Lewis himself did not know. I suppose Mr. Tumnus was very much like a bird in that way, for Lewis did not get to see where Mr. Tumnus went after he'd been sighted (or who he met along the way). He had to come with that part himself.

 

Another author I greatly enjoy said something else about ideas and the art of having them that seems fitting to share. When asked how he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman said that when it comes to having good ideas there is only one big difference between writers and ordinary people: writers notice when they're having them. It is like the gift of being able to remember your dreams; like an awareness for critters, some people notice it, and some people don't. But anyone can, if they try.

Indeed, like bird-watching, writing can at times be tedious and uneventful. After all, a Faun walking through snow with an umbrella is not a story in and of itself.

But it only feels that way so long as you are expecting something to happen. Birds do not lead lives of drama, not to the unimaginative eye. But when the bird takes off and flies away and you can no longer see it, some people simply keep dreaming and drifting. Few take the time to wonder where the bird goes and what it does before the next time it is seen. 

Tom the Oldest

Tom Bombadil is a being so powerful and strange that even his creator did not know what to make of him. 

 

While fans and scholars have speculated and disputed his nature, they neglect to consider that the man who discovered was himself wise enough to refrain from doing so. Tolkien respected the mysterious nature of Tom Bombadil. He did not fret with Tom but simply left him be in his corner of Middle Earth, a corner which by Tom's mere presence is perhaps the most unusual and miraculous of that map. 

 

Since I am rather well-read in Middle Earth lore, casual Tolkien fans sometimes ask me if I know who or what Tom Bombadil is. But in all my years of enjoying Tolkien's lore I have never found an explanation concerning Tom Bombadil that satisfied me, but one. 

 

 

It seemed a fact not worth mentioning that the character of Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll that belonged to one of Tolkien's children. While this may go so far as to explain some of the very specific and colorful attire Tom is known for wearing, such as his yellow boots, as well as Tom's carefree and almost childish nature, it does not at first glance say much else about the ancient figure; till you learn that Tolkien used to tell his children stories about that doll.

 

While reading Tom's own songs about skipping through the trees and along river beds, one can almost picture Tolkien bent over his children's beds, the shadow of the doll cast across the bedroom wall as he animated it with his hands and his voice, bringing it to life with his stories. 

 

Tolkien told his children stories long before he ever actually completed writing one that satisfied him; and so, one can know with certainty that Tom came along long before Bilbo or Hùrin, or even Gandalf. 

These were only shadows cast big and small, vague impressions in Tolkien's mind left by the lore he loved and the legends he read. Names of characters he later wrote about can be found in obscure Norse fragments we know Tolkien used to study. Images resembling Tolkien's own line some of the Fairie realms he once dwelt in.

 

But Tom Bombadil was there, real, tangible, childish, put forth with the easy flow of a narrative told for one's own children, living up only to their whimsical standards, and not Tolkien's own. Tom offers us a glimpse into what those stories might have been like, there in the bedrooms of his children when he did not burden himself with self-doubt and a work beyond imagining in the course of an evening. 

It is strange that something that at first seems so easy should puzzle readers for so very long. Tolkien did not wish to understand Tom Bombadil. Indeed, while most everything else about Middle Earth is rich with history and thought, Tom Bombadil exists outside of that, he escapes that, in more ways than one.

We must decide that Tom Bombadil must simply be left be. 

 

 

 

In the end, the only thing that has ever made any amount of sense to me about Tom Bombadil was what Gandalf says about him. At the Council of Elrond, he tells that Tom "is oldest." 

Tom is older than Middle Earth both inside Tolkien's works and outside of it. Indeed, out of all the vivid faces and scenes that linger when I reflect on all I have loved in Middle Earth, I know Tom Bombadil has been around the longest. He was around long before any of Middle Earth's histories were written, for he lived outside of them once. He knew Tolkien before he was weighted by success and immense writings.

I know only that Tom Bombadil is so ancient that the only origin I have ever traced of him in all my Middle Earth wanderings is the curious and puzzling figure of a Dutch doll in yellow boots. And where that came from, none but Tolkien need ever know. Though I greatly doubt that he himself would have been able to remember.