even though it is only early September & in the strip mall with the Target where I went to get a sympathy card for my sister-in-law whose mom died & wound up instead getting a six-pack of sympathy cards because lately my friends’ parents keep dying I noticed that the newly shuttered Bed Bath & Beyond next to the also vacated Buy Buy Baby had just reopened as a Halloween City, & it is always too soon for retail holidays, candy in bulk turning up in the seasonal aisle in late August right after school supplies are moved to clearance. Sacred time is indefinitely recoverable , indefinitely repeatable , wrote Eliade & I’m not sure what qualifies as sacred when I am profane, or, rather, historical, or just not-transcendent but I still refuse to be intimidated by time even when, at the head of the path to the beach at Eastern Point Light- house, there’s a dead gull lying on its side with a rock placed carefully over its head, as if to say, hey! if you want to experience the terrifying beauty of Dog Bar Breakwater— of the rough surf pounding Cape Ann while you walk on granite blocks with wide cracks between them stretching half a mile into the ocean— you must first step over a reminder of your own mortality & mortality isn’t the same as death, but a sort of awareness that time itself is sacred & epiphanous & as much as I plan I think maybe the one-day-at-a-time people are right: we never know what’s around the irreversible corner. My sister calls from her car on the way to do tahara —preparing a body for burial by washing it, in a ritual act of purification.
She is a rabbi so this is not as unusual as it seems, but any Jew can be part of a holy society of volunteers who tend to the dead gently, with intention & many apologies: a chevra kadisha . This practice, I’d imagine, leads to embodied temporal awareness, which is nothing like standing under elms in autumn when their leaves turn yellow & fall like snow in moments when the wind picks up though it’s still over seventy most days, dusk arriving earlier & earlier until it’s basically winter when it comes to the light if not the weather & is it worth mentioning that I also bought two felt pumpkins from the Target dollar bin because buying only a six-pack of sympathy cards was too depressing & we are all participating in the passing of time which I refuse to be intimidated by, even when those golden leaves catch in my hair, whether time is cyclical or linear, whether I’m distracted or have focus. Good people are meant to engage in a daily practice of seeing carefully, of opening to what’s literally in front of us, the word “now” & its demands, but I find any mono-focus on the present moment moralizing & want to resist, though perhaps a kind of dichotomy with no gray area would be healthier for me & if I had good temporal habits I would not think of the past, on some days with me all the time like the arthritis in my knees, on others asserting itself like extra pens spilling from my purse when I’m digging in the dark expanse for my phone & keys.
Even worse: the what-ifs or any kind of future plans, & when my friend sends her mother’s obituary for me to edit (trust the poet) again I am steeped in mortality: leaves behind a loving family who will miss her dearly, she was a leader & loyal friend whose greatest loves were . . .
I hope someone can answer that question for me one day, the way, when I brought my mother’s gold watch to the jeweller because it wasn’t keeping time, he said, you can try laying it on its side & tapping it , but the movement is probably broken & you’ll need to send it away for repair . In legal terms “repair time” means the interval between the issuance of a corrective- maintenance work order & the return of the system to operation so perhaps the best we can hope for with time is not to be reassured or comforted or heartened or emboldened or solaced by it, but just to stay ticking. This is drawn from “Assembled Audience.
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