Happy Birthday Dad

For the stories you gave me, here is one for you.

Summer is blazing in early, the days toward fall rushing away. Too soon there will be days that I leave home in the dark, and come home into even deeper dark. I will walk into a home bathed mostly in twilight, a black dog, a shadow of warmth against the walls, the movement of his tail a tick against the time he waited for me.

We've set out clocks ahead, but in only a few short months we turn them back.

We'll stop saving our daylight. We'll stop saving time. My day here, late evening, lies under a blanket of night that began to thicken and bunch up at 9 o'clock, where just for a moment, light hovered in an orb over the pond, a UFO of brightness, that with a blink, vanished up into the heavens, leaving just black exhaust in its wake.

It comes back, in the early mornings, when the light creeps in too early, when I still want to sleep, bringing with it the alarm of things to do. Garbage to be taken out, shirt ironed, Barkley taken for a walk, leaving the house in his trail, the house a lonely echo in our wake.

Summer is here and soon it will be gone. Time passing much too quickly, fleeting and fading as the laughter of children. On the wall, an old anniversary clock, inherited from my parents, ticks, the evening light only illuminating its face, so it appears to hang suspended in space. A ticking clock, holding in its hidden depths the regimented chaos of this world I've inherited, its ordered cadence, the sound that moves me onward at a dizzying speed into a future still unperceived.

When I was a young bride, I lived on a small farm, raising some hay and a small belligerent group of Longhorns. I was alone so much of the time, my husband being an ag pilot, gone much of the time. Despite time away in my own job, when I was home, I had my share of chores, often both his and mine. I had to rally myself up early to tend to the place, at the rooster's crow at first light, rising early as poets do. Lighting a fire from antique ashes, assembling my spirit from wounds and balm, from water pump to barn stall. Time beginning with measured intent, and from seeds and the dry bones of the land, I grew, as a dutiful spouse, I tended. Whatever the hand of circumstance had brought, it was my duty, to be there on time. To reconcile hot and cold, dark and bright, richly expanding a much bruised heart, to nourish the land or the trusting beast in the stall.

That was all before, when everything rose early, when time slowed to a crawl of duty and need and long nights crying for something I didn't know until too late that I needed. When everything seemed looming, demanding, large and unchanging. I heard a cow moan low for her calf in the distance. Or was that me?

Dawn over the plains of a midwest home. 15 years later. A thousand miles away. I see the sun rise. You can't really see the corn in the distance until about 7 AM, everything is soft and filtered as if through a lens of fog. I had but a moment to enjoy it, to pick up time like a clock and put it in my pocket. To savor the day as far lights fringe unto the pleasant sheen of day, as fragmentary whispers of sound and scent blows from understalks of silent corn, of leafless souls unknown. A walk cut short. Short on time, for I had to be at work soon.

Two hundred years ago, the days had their own slow cycle, full and round, curved as a woman's breast. No one could have imagined today's electronic dislocation, when on advent of the Industrial age, time was taken from us and slaved to a time clock. Time suddenly belonged to someone else. Time changed from that of a fellow worker to a disciplinarian, a nun's whack on the back of the hand, doctrinal and unyielding.

People no longer walked the land, we went in cars, faster and faster, as roads got longer and days got shorter, driving to the market for our dinner, instead of walking the land in search of game. The game itself has moved further inward, as had we.

In the dimming light I look through some photos. A lifetime in those photos, many of the people in them already gone. The photos lay there on the table now, expended laughter and corporeal touch; the spent ghosts of voluptuous movements and temporal hearts, captured in a moment of time. Pictures of my Mom and Dad. My father at a duck Camp in Arkansas, just the two of us and a black lab while my husband was off working. My Dad was in his 70's, yet he took to the event like a young lad, a gun swinging by his side as we worked our way out into the woods.. Walking through measures of wild land that remain as unchanged as it had been 200 years ago. Wilderness as he remembered it, tangled brush and clear sky, tremendous soarings of oak and ash, which knew no axe but the occasional hunter.

We were out all day, heading in, not by any clock, but by the rhythmic cadence of breath and the measure of bone and muscle. The dog was reluctant to come in, one more, one more!, he seemed to speak to us. But our stomachs signaled dinner and with a whistle we called him in, panting and trembling with the excitement of the day, up the bank, to unraised voice and gentle hand, seeking his pack.

Back to the camp we settled to clean our birds and prepare our supper, hot coals lighting our work. Dad said grace to the communion of a small glass of whisky and water, giving thanks for slightly burnt roast meat, canned beans and some bread that once actually resembled bread, mushed flat in my packs and tasting of the outdoors. It was the best meal we could remember eating in a long time, tating of our labor and tinged with the smoke of our wildness.

The dog settled into sleep by the dying fire, as in the darkness we prepared our beds, small cots underneath and ancient sky. . As the world would slowly down, stars beginning to spin their stories in space, we talked. My father told tales of hunting as a boy in Montana, myself lying quiet as a child, listening to bedtime stories that knew no age limit, looking up at the quiet belly of canvas, hearing not a clock, but only the measured breath of content as sleep brushed up the remaining crumbs of the day.

When was the last time you spent a day like that? With no clock, no schedule. Now, too often, we rush and we scurry and we do not take the time to stop and think of the times we gave up, the times spent rushing after something we didn't really want, wasted minutes, wasted days.

Until suddenly, years have passed and the second hand poises in mid second as the phone rings. A call in the late hours of the night, the number that of your family out far away. With a call at that time of the night, time comes to a complete stop. And in that moment all you register is the sound of breath and heartbeat, the tone of the phone held away from your ear, outside, the rush of the wind, and the bark of your dog, awoken in another room. One bark, short and syncopated. Then a couple more. Then nothing. Simply the sound of your heart beating. Then you hear it. The laugh of your Dad on the other end, calling too late because his body doesn't listen to time zones, only his heart, and he wanted to hear your voice, to make sure you were OK.


But as you listen to him you hear something else. The proverbial clock in your pocket. . and it's still ticking, slower, with a sound you never noticed before. Then with the moonlight reflecting off a tear that's forming, when you least expect it, when the sound of emptiness is all you expect, you hear the bark again. Faint but insistent. The quiet sound of one who watches over you from a long distance. And you breathe in deep as that sound fills the world with bright articulate tone, dreaming of life slowed down, time ticking in your pocket. Time you both still have.

You can not take time back, like conjured memory. But you can look around and listen carefully to the slow precious ticks of what you have left. Take it and hold on to it, saving it til it's full and dense and strong, like a house around you. A structure that will shelter you and your heart, strengthened with mortar and wood, steel and love. For no matter what the change of clocks may bring, the stolen minutes of warmth, the hours of distance, the chime of mortality, you'll still have it, for you've saved it for just this day. Time measured out and savored.