The Concept of Time
It Changes
Once upon a time, I lived by the clock. I got up in the wee hours and wrote for a couple of hours, then got dressed for work. Writing early was the only option for me. I couldn’t summon the energy or interest to write at night after work.
Work was that draining. And those wee hours were magical, just as I am writing now. The cats were asleep, and my husband was asleep. The big traffic noises outside of our house hadn’t yet started, so it was quiet.
Now, at 5 am, except for the ringing in my ears, it is still quiet. The traffic noises don’t bother me significantly. I’ve lived in this house for 35 years. I got used to them. Actually, there were times when I pretended that noise was the sound of surf, waves rolling in on a beach. Somebody commented to me that was a nice way to think about what, for some people, is a horror. I can’t think of traffic as a horror. It is a necessary evil. I wonder what it would be like to live in the country where you can hear birdsong.
The ringing in my ears has pretty much obliterated the traffic noise, but sometimes I pretend that it is a soothing wave as well. The ringing in my ears is sort of a white noise. If you don’t know what white noise is, you probably aren’t old enough. Back in the day, when people went to bed at night, so did their televisions. The channels went off the air, and a fizzy black and white dotted random pattern appeared on the screen. It was the noise it made that we called white noise. Think of the HBO logo. Yeah, that’s white noise. A television in snore mode.
The idea of writing came to me early. It was a blessing from an overworked teacher.
Mrs. Brown was in charge of two grades. In our classroom, divided down the middle, the fifth graders, of which I was a member, sat on the left side by the windows, and the third graders sat on the right.
We were not friends with the third graders as they were practically babies.
Mrs. Brown divided her time between us. Every day there was a new picture pasted to construction paper on the wall at the front of the classroom. We would crowd around it to look at the picture and then return to our desks to write about it. I don’t remember how much time we had, but it was enough to write a story about the picture. I had never had an assignment like that, nor would I ever again in the 13 different schools I attended before I graduated from high school. At the time, we were in Oslo, Norway, and my father worked in a medieval castle, Akershus Festning.
It was interesting that when I began to learn Spanish in the 8th grade, the teacher commented that I was the first person she’d ever met who spoke Spanish with a Norwegian accent. Get me drunk, and I’m fluent in four languages. Actually, I don’t drink anymore.
Before we left for Norway, my father learned to speak Norwegian. His teacher was a woman. Once we got to Norway, the people in his office teased him and told him he sounded like a Stavanger fishwife.
But time, as I mentioned at the beginning of this story, means less and less to me as I get older. Covid helped with that because that’s when I officially became a recluse and began to write in earnest.
I can even describe what a writer’s high is. I first experienced it as a teenager running. I was so focused on running that I went into my own little world. It didn’t last very long, and to be truthful, I haven’t run in years. My husband, though, is our family’s runner. At 76 years old, he’s run eight marathons, and this was after his doctors said he would never run again after he’d broken his back in three places. You don’t tell my husband no. Come to think of it, you don’t tell me no either.
The next time I experienced a high was with meditation. Again, it is a separate world. It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens. It’s like an orgasm, except it lasts longer.
The final time was a writer’s high, where you settle down to write and come up an hour later, thinking it was only three minutes.
Time disappears. I like that about writing.
Imagine, the job I eventually ended up with wouldn’t pay a dime for a long, long time, but I learned it in the fifth grade.
Do you have any stories of when you first learned the love of writing?
Thanks for reading.
The Links: Akershus Festning in Norway Stavanger, Norway