Rushing the Season

Don’t worry—I’m not about to launch into a diatribe about Christmas displays in stores before Halloween. No, the “season” in question is Standard Time.

My walking route comes within two blocks of a church that has, in its belfry, a loudspeaker that broadcasts clock chimes. It chimes the quarter and half hours using a traditional (Westminster?) pattern. The full chime precedes the striking of the hour, which is followed by a hymn. The clock is usually pretty accurate, so that the striking of the hour begins right at the top of the hour.

I was finishing up a work project this morning and didn’t get out for a walk till well after noon and thus was within earshot of the church at 12:59, when, sure enough, I heard the chimes. To my surprise, though, the clock then struck not one but twelve!

I have two theories about this phenomenon: (1) the clock is automatically set by some (slightly) outdated software that believes Standard Time began last weekend (as it used to do), or (2) the church staff leaves at noon on Fridays and decided to “fall back” to Sunday’s time before leaving. The senior pastor of the church is a member of my Rotary club, so I suppose I can ask him next week if I think of it—not something I’ll lose a lot of sleep over, I guess.

Indeed, I’ll be enjoying an extra hour of sleep this weekend thanks to the time change. I do really think I’m owed two hours, though, since I had to “spring forward” twice this year, once in early March when the United States changed time and again the last weekend in March when the time change occurred in England, where I was at the time. (The latter, combined with an alarm clock accident, conspired to cause us to very nearly miss our flight home.)

All this brings to mind the incredible waste of manhours involved in resetting clocks twice a year. Even more drastic is the necessity to reset our body clocks. I recently read that, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, there is a 5% increase in heart attacks over the first week after setting clocks forward (6% on Monday and Wednesday, 10% on Tuesday) and a corresponding 5 % decrease after setting them back (but only on Monday). The fact that the increase is more pronounced than the decrease suggests that the temporal disorientation is not worth it. Sure, it’s nice to have that “extra” hour of daylight on summer evenings, but I’ll be much gladder not to have to be getting up in the dark now. I would happily live on Standard Time year-round, but if the choice came down to living on Daylight Saving Time year-round, I could live with that, too, to avoid the semiannual nuisance of resetting clocks—and myself.

October’s Bright Blue Weather

When I was in junior high school, “morning announcements” were broadcast to homeroom classes over the P.A. (public address system or intercom), as I believe is still true (at least in U.S. public schools). The announcements were made, however, not by students, as I believe is common nowadays, but by the assistant principal, a man who was not well liked (because he was also in charge of “discipline,” he was regarded more as an adversary than a friend).

Even though I can now acknowledge that we were at an age when no adult can do anything right, some of his actions still seem cringeworthy, as when, on St. Patrick’s Day, he would begin the announcements by intoning, with careful enunciation suggesting anything but an Irish accent, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye,” giving “ye” the full benefit of a long vowel (as in “ye olde”).

But the groaning really started when, on some beautiful day in October, he would read us the poem “October’s Bright Blue Weather.” I’ve long since forgotten any of the verses of this poem, but the refrain “October’s bright blue weather” is seared in my brain and comes unbidden on such a day as today.

After torrential rain all day last Thursday and a couple of days of overcast lasting well into midday, yesterday morning and today have dawned cloudless, with a sky that, by the time I went out for my walk, was a brilliant robin’s egg blue (I suppose it would be more apt and accurate to describe it as “cerulean blue,” but that seems self-referential). It is the sort of day that makes one glad to be alive and out of doors (despite the chill and quite a stiff breeze), and I can’t help agreeing with Helen Hunt Jackson:

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
     And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
     October’s bright blue weather;

Scouting Houses

Like farmers, construction workers around here work “all the hours God sends,” so it is not unusual to see them working on a Saturday, especially if there has been inclement weather earlier in the week. On Sunday mornings, though, one can generally count on finding construction sites deserted, so I schedule my new home construction explorations for my Sunday-morning walks.

This morning I checked again on the “mystery room” I’ve been wondering about. I’ve been forced to conclude it must be intended as a sort of butler’s pantry. It opens off a small hallway that connects the kitchen with the dining room and living room/study, and it now has counters and shelves that suggest storage of crockery or even food. I’m still a little puzzled by two tall cabinets without shelves (one might be a broom closet, but two?). I will continue to keep tabs on this room as long as I can get into the house.

I spent considerably more time exploring the gigantic edifice going up around the corner. Although it doesn’t have actual bay frontage (it’s on a bluff above the City’s bayfront park), it does overlook the bay, so I guess it is technically a “bay house.” My first assumption, given its scale, was that it was intended as a sort of family compound, where extended family could be accommodated for summer vacations. It has a three-car garage, a “breakfast room” larger than most formal dining rooms (large enough for a table seating at least 12), and a huge open space (connected dining room and family room) extending across the width of the house and opening onto a porch facing the bay (one of several porches opening off various rooms). It also appeared to have numerous bedrooms upstairs and down. It seemed clearly designed for housing and/or entertaining a large crowd.

Today I was pleased to see a sheaf of house plans laid out on a table. But the first-floor plan was crossed out with a large red X and had “Do Not Use” written across it, and it quickly became evident that the second-floor plan also bore no relation to the actual framing. The original plan was for a spacious master suite on the first floor, along with a “study” with its own closet and adjoining full bath; the general lines of these remained, but the master bath suite had been drastically rearranged (with one shower room not connected with the rest of the bath at all but instead opening off the entrance to the master suite), and the study bath was also different. Similarly, the large room adjoining the kitchen, originally designated as an entry/laundry room with a pantry and powder room opening off it, had clearly been rethought. (The architect who designed the house is one who doesn’t come cheap, and I shudder to think how much all these changes must be costing.)

Upstairs, the area (on the plan) is divided into Bedroom A (with its adjoining bath, closet, and attic space) and Bedroom B (ditto), but the actual upstairs is now cut up into smaller and more puzzling portions. The most inexplicable is the bath suite of one of the bedrooms. Although the toilet is in a separate room (with window), the tub and lavatory open into the bedroom through a double-width cased opening. Even assuming that double doors will fill the opening, this seems odd. It would be overkill even for handicapped access, and since there is no evidence of any plan for an elevator to the second floor, this would be nonsense, anyway. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this puzzle to see how it develops!

Giving Directions

One experience that I dread when walking is the moment when a car pulls up alongside me and the window is rolled down. Inevitably this means that someone is about to ask for directions.

I’m pretty hopeless at giving directions under the best of circumstances: I have my own personal landmarks and often forget the names of streets. With preparation, I can provide pretty sensible directions, but when I’m caught off guard, I tend to draw a blank.

When I’m walking, it’s even worse. Although I know exactly how to get to many places from my home, when I’m away from home I have to first figure out where I am in relation to the destination, which can be quite disorienting. And all the while I’m uncomfortably conscious of the seconds ticking away on my stopwatch. If the encounter becomes involved, I’ll stop it, but I don’t like to have to do that. Despite my best efforts, though, I almost always realize after the car has pulled away that there was a much more efficient route I could have provided given a little more time to think.

So when I see (or hear or sense) a car slowing down, I’m often tempted to keep walking and ignore it or to say, “I’m sorry. I don’t live around here” (technically true, in a way, once I get several streets away) or even “Sorry. No English.” But that would be unfriendly and unhelpful, and our town is so well known for being friendly, I don’t want to spoil its reputation.

Anyway, I had one of those heart-sinking moments this morning. I was not far from home but was already deeply preoccupied with trying to figure out how best to tackle a particularly troublesome book manuscript I’m currently working on, and I resented the interruption, but the car was coming toward me, so I couldn’t very well pretend not to see it. It was the first in a line of three cars, and at first I worried that it was holding up traffic, but I later realized that all three cars were together. They were filled with women of the sort I was brought up to call “ladies,” though they probably think of themselves as “girls.” The passenger behind the open window asked, “I wonder if you could tell me how to get to where the restaurants are.”

“Where the restaurants are”? I could probably give passable directions to a specific restaurant, but “where the restaurants are”? I tried to envision the area as a vast food court, without much success. There are plenty of restaurants in town; did she just need directions back to town? Or did she mean restaurants out on “the four-lane” (Greeno Road/U.S. Highway 98)? Although she was deep in a residential neighborhood with no restaurants in sight, she was only a few blocks from town, which has practically nothing but restaurants (and gift shops and antique stores). How in the world did she get where she was without passing at least a few of these? Where did she come from? (I later realized that most likely the ladies were in town for the Coastal Birdfest, which is held on the Fairhope campus of Faulkner State Community College; they would absolutely have had to pass at least half a dozen restaurants to get from Faulkner to where I encountered them.)

Needless to say, I became a gibbering idiot. “Restaurants? There aren’t any restaurants around here [meaning the immediate neighborhood, which we call the Bluff District]. There are restaurants in town”—waving vaguely in the direction of town. At this point I could see that this was going to take time, so I stopped my watch, in the process noticing that it seemed not to be running in the first place, which further rattled me. This was not going well.

If I’d had good sense, I could have asked what sort of restaurant they were looking for and suggested a specific one, but really all I wanted to do was get rid of them. Unfortunately, I seem to have given the impression that there was no food to be had in Fairhope.

“Well, then, could you tell us how to get back to the interstate?”

The interstate? That seemed pretty drastic! I10 is a good ten miles away. They’d pass dozens of restaurants on the way, so presumably that could work. They were already headed toward town, so I gave them directions to get back on the main drag that would take them to “the four-lane.” Let them figure it out from there. Or perhaps they would inadvertently discover town as they drove through it.

Silent Running

If you have been hopefully checking this space every day to see if I’ve posted anything of earthshaking import, it won’t have escaped your notice that I haven’t posted anything (worthwhile or not) for two weeks. The last few days I’ve been thinking about why that is. The bottom line is basically this: company (that is, house guests).

My daughter and son-in-law, who live in England, arrived October 3; they will leave tomorrow. On September 14, I emailed the photo below to my daughter with the subject line “Why you can’t come home yet.”

As I’ve mentioned, I’m working through the photos, scrapbooks, documents, and other memorabilia from my father’s house, and I’ve been using my daughter’s room as one of several temporary storage locations for the boxes and piles of material I’m going through. As the time for her arrival drew near, I had to really “get serious” about getting this cleared out. She had assured me that as long as there was “a path to the bed,” it would be fine, but I was aiming at a higher standard. In the event, she was amazed at the transformation and very pleased at the spaciousness of the “guest room” even though there were still several stacks of boxes at the foot of the bed and elsewhere (not to mention in the hall, in my office, in the living room, etc.). At any rate, that massive “cleanup” (or “neatening”) project consumed the usable parts of several days.

I had expected my time to be entirely at their disposal while they were here—for cozy mother-daughter chats and other family activities—and I had managed to more or less clear the decks of “business” activities for the time they’d be here. That has worked out well, in fact. Last Saturday we mounted up an expedition to the local outlet mall and spent over six hours shopping for maternity clothes and other desiderata. Since then my daughter and I have attended several functions together while her husband was away on business, and the four of us (my husband and I and the two of them) have done a number of things together.

But it has still been an exceptionally relaxed and lazy week, with both daughter and son-in-law out of the house on business or visiting with friends a good bit of the time. I’ve had time to read, catch up on online activities, and generally loaf. So why haven’t I been blogging?

One reason is probably a perceived lack of material. For that I could at least partly blame the weather (we’ve had a good bit of rain) and scheduled events that prevented me from walking, thus depriving me of “thoughts,” but that would be disingenuous: what I’ve been thinking about both when walking and when not is “Why am I not blogging?”

I have come to the conclusion that the answer is not lack of material, time, opportunity, or any other reasonable excuse but just lack of concentration. Having extra people in the house, even when they’re not there, is a distraction. If they’re at home, they may interrupt at any time. If they’re out, they may come home and interrupt at any time. And while writing this drivel really doesn’t require high-level compositional effort in actual practice, in theory it requires concentration, a few uninterrupted moments to put a few coherent sentences together. On days when I can’t seem to finish a brief newsgroup post (one paragraph) without my train of thought being interrupted, the prospect of writing a blog post seems out of the question.

My daughter and son-in-law will leave tomorrow, and, barring catastrophe, we will not see them again till next June (when their baby will be nearly three months old). So I am in no hurry for them to leave; these last few hours will doubtless be spent trying to cram in all the things we meant to say and do. But after they leave, even though I will have to immediately dive back into the work I’ve been deferring, life will seem more serene as we return to our “normal routine.”