When I was a little boy, both of my parents worked a lot, and I spent a lot of time at my neighbor’s house. They were retired farmers, and as my surviving grandfather lived far away, they filled that role in my life.
They were very much a product of their time. They didn’t follow daylight saving time, or government time, as they called it, and they didn’t have air conditioning, although I think that was mostly on him, because after he died, she installed a window unit in the room she spent the most time in. They unplugged the TV when it wasn’t in use, lest it cause a fire. And every day after 3PM, he would sit on the east side of his house in the shade.
He was, by the time I remember him best, pretty ill, and his days of strenuous activity were behind him. He had a chair in the living room that was his chair, and he would sit there and read the paper, or tell me stories, or watch the news to get the weather. And he would watch the way the light from the sun moved across the floor through the window, and when it reached the edge of the couch, it was time to go outside.
I pointed out to him you didn’t have to watch the sun—you could just look at the clock and go outside after three.
“But what happens if your clock breaks?” he asked. “Besides, the light lines up with the clock a little different every day. The light is what matters, not the time.”
He would sit out there until suppertime—about 6:30 in the summer. And I would play at his feet, and we would watch the cars go by, which were many fewer in those days than now, and he taught me to lie on my back and look at the clouds and see how they would shift shapes, becoming bears and cats and sometimes look like nothing but clouds and yet be pretty all the same.
Last Sunday was daylight saving time, but I was out of town when it happened. And, to my eternal shame, I did, in fact, change my clocks. Honestly, these days, most of them change themselves. But today was a gorgeous day, and I went for a long walk, like I do most days, and I saw the white clouds on the blue sky, and I would swear I saw both a bear and a cat. I like to think that, somewhere, wherever he is, he did too.
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