New doctor day

Text message from my doctor daughter: “All the new doctors are walking around like deer in headlights!”

Don’t have voluntary surgery today, or for a few months if you can help it.

Slow time

Memorial Day weekend: time slows down. There’s time for reading, for gardening, for catching up on Lost; time for the college graduation fireworks and the small-town band.

On these three days we have world enough, and time.

A moment in my time

Tina’s painting is on my wall; Santorini, from our trip to Greece with Terry, is on my monitor; and at 11 am I Celebrated Time here.

Coming up: A universal moment in May

If you’re trying to meditate or pray or just calm down, you’re supposed to think about (or, in sixties terms, be in) the present moment. You can’t change the past or control the future, so just forget about them, in other words.

For me the present moment usually ends up being inside my own head, a space that’s often teeming with lots of un-present moment stuff. But sometimes I try to think about the big present moment outside my head: what’s happening right now, all over the world. Where each of my friends is, right now, what they’re doing or thinking; what the present moment is for all the people all over the place I don’t know and never will (this is not recommended as a way to calm down).

But leave it to the New York Times: they’re going to capture it. Next Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 U.T.C., everyone (well everyone who has read this, at least) is supposed to take a picture and send it to the Times, where some poor soul will then create a “global mosaic.” (If, like me, you have no idea what time 15:00 U.T.C. is, you can look it up here; and if, like me – even though I fancy myself a time specialist – you’ve never heard of this abbreviation, it stands for Coordinated Universal Time, despite the out-of-order letters; and if you’re wondering why they did away with Greenwich Mean Time, at least this time specialist can help you with that.)

So anyway, we all have a week to figure out how to encapsulate our present moments into a photograph, as well as a way to remember when 15:00 U.T.C. is.

Time in a Bottle

While I was growing up, I had my own savings account and my own special dog-eared savings deposit book at what I think was called the County Trust Bank. I imagined all my dollar bills sitting safely in a long slot, like a post office box, waiting for me to come take them out again if I needed something special, like the bike I bought with my own money. And it seemed like an amazing bonus that the bank actually paid me to keep my money there.

That didn’t make too much sense to me until my mother explained that my money wasn’t really in its safe little box – that other people were using it, and they paid the bank money for letting them use my money, and then the bank paid me part of that money…

This was a frightening thought. What if they never gave my money back?

Time is money, they say, and so today I have the same sort of paranoid thinking about the hour we’ve lost. Where is it? Who is doing what with it, and what if it never comes back?

Next fall, unless Bernie Madoff gets involved, we’ll get it back. By then we’ll know what happened to healthcare reform, and whether the House and Senate were returned to the Republicans, and whether we had a lot of hurricanes, and whether all the things we’re hoping for and worrying about now came to pass, or not.

Inshallah.

Solstice clerestory

My ideal house would overlook the ocean, with the sound of crashing waves in every room. On the very top, where they used to put those widow’s walks (and now, at the shore, they have hot tubs), I’d have a room with four clerestory windows (technically, I guess, I couldn’t call them clerestory, because they wouldn’t be above eye level, but I love the word so I’d call them that anyway) and two picture windows.

I guess I’d need to find some sort of astronomical architect, because it would be a very oddly shaped room. It would face directly east and west, so that at the equinoxes the sun would rise and set exactly in the middle of the picture windows. But, and this is the hard part, the room would have to jut out, or be shaped like a hexagon, so that the clerestory windows would catch the rising and setting sun directly only at the solstices.

And now I see that the Anastasi already designed my room, centuries ago.

October at the Duc’s

Here are the Duc’s peasants again, tilling and sowing (it must be the hay they harvested in June). I wonder if he ever felt guilty, looking out his luxurious Paris window at all the work other people were doing for him.

I know I said I was done with calendars, but…

I love the French Republican calendar. It has (well, had, since Napoleon abolished it in 1806) ten months with seasonal names, like Snowy, Rainy, Windy (but in French, they have the same endings: Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse). Right now we’re in the month of Vendémiaire (Grape Harvest); Brumaire (Fog) and Frimaire (Frost) will follow. And you just can’t beat Thermidor, which starts in those dog days at the end of July.

Plus it’s all very metric: each of the twelve months had three ten-day weeks; each day ten hours; each hour 100 minutes; each minute – well, you can guess. Unfortunately, the solar system isn’t at all metric, so they had the same old problem of intercalculary days, added at the end of the year, and leap years, but they managed this fine for the twelve orderly years the calendar lasted.

What I love about it is that each day has its own name, but the logic breaks down here – or at least I can’t figure out why they chose the names that they did. For some reason, days ending in five are named for animals, those ending in zero for tools, and all the rest for plants or minerals. Today is Tomate, tomorrow is Orge, and Wednesday is Tonneau.
Tomato Day, Barley Day, Barrel Day.

Order descending into randomness. At least all the saints actually died on their days in the Roman Catholic calendar – well, except for the apocryphal ones, and the Gregorian conversion, and the unreliability of history, and…

Those stacks of calendar pages just don’t quite line up

For some reason I thought that when Pope Gregory fixed the calendar in 1582, everybody but England went along.

Not true (and by the way, this is my last fixing-of-the-calendar entry, so just tune out if this is too boring. And why it fascinates me so, I’ll never quite understand. But for historians, all those dates and non-dates between 1582 and 1923, when Greece finally succumbed, must be a nightmare.).

For Spain, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, and most of Italy (some of Italy resisted the Pope, of all things), today was October 15, 1582, instead of October 5 (thereby fixing Easter back to the all-important formula of the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon, which is usually but not always the astronomical full moon, on or after March 21st). (Why Easter was so important, as opposed to Christmas, for example, we’ll never know.)

Now, there were a whole bunch of countries that, understandably, couldn’t understand why a pope should be messing around with their calendars, and the longer they took to get back in sync the more days they had to get rid of. So it took Denmark, for example, until 1700 to obliterate all of February after the 18th. In Russia, they decided there was so much going on in 1918 they might as well do away with some of that year, so February didn’t start till Valentine’s Day.

But Swedish historians must really tear their hair out. Sweden decided to make the change gradually, by eliminating all the leap days between 1700 and 1740, when, theoretically, they’d be caught up; but in 1704 and 1708 they forgot, so whatever historical events happened in Sweden on February 29 in those years really did happen. King Charles XII, in his wisdom, decided to fix this problem by adding February 30 to the year 1712, and somehow they limped along till 1753, when they finally did away with February after the 17th.

Got all that?

Now I’ll go back to celebrating time, still seeing the days as little stacks of calendar pages, using the faulty premise that a date is a date is a date.

09 09 09

If you go to Bing, you find out that it equals 0.111111, that Facebook wants 999,999 members by today, something about bowel incontinence, and something about romance after 60. If you go to Google, you can find out why 09/09/09 is special, what it means (for example, that it’s the upside-down 666, those scary devil numbers), and how to get ready.

I’m not really interested in Facebook’s marketing strategy or the other two things. After 12/12/12, there are no more repeating dates till 2101 – and I’m not going to be around by then.

So Bing, you have only three more years to prove yourself. But I understand the world is supposed to end in 2012 anyway – could you explain that to us?