Lost Hours

 Every spring, Matilda set the clock forward an hour, only to reverse the process in the fall just as she started noticing the days shortening, making them even that much shorter. She idly wondered where the time went, that hour that got cut out between 2 and 3 a.m. and then added back again later in the year. When she had been a child, her father had explained Daylight Saving thus: Finding his blanket was too short to cover his toes, the owner thereof cut a section from the top and sewed it on the bottom, so that the length remained the same, but the distribution of material changed. That was all very fine and well when it came to explaining DST and our return from it. It did not explain where that single hour went for the six or so months until it was returned to its rightful place.

Tonight was the time change, springing forward, and Matilda was determined to find out. She made herself a pot of tea and got comfortable in the armchair with a book, a mystery thriller, so that she wouldn't be tempted to close her eyes and doze off, and set a timer to go off just before 2 a.m. when that hour would be cleanly snipped from the agenda and her computer clock would flip to 3 a.m. automatically.

In the middle of a riveting car chase scene, the microwave timer beeped, and Matilda looked up. Two minutes left to Standard time and then DST would kick in. She laid down the book and waited, watching the seconds lapse on the virtual clock on her laptop monitor. At precisely 1:59:00, a small animated icon of an elf or gnome or some other mythical creature crawled out of the edge of her monitor and traipsed across her screen. Perhaps it was a brownie or a hob. Matilda was sadly ignorant of the denizens of fairyland, in spite of having read her share of fairy tales as a child.

The small creature carried a net and a jar, and wore a tool belt with a knife, hammer, pliers, and other tools of a carpenter's trade. Intrigued, Matilda watched as it positioned itself next to the clock counting up, readying itself for the moment 2 a.m. would normally strike. It readied itself with its knife in one hand, net in the other, and at precisely 1:59:59, swiftly cut 2 a.m. free, catching it deftly with the net, and then sliding it into the jar and corking it firmly. 

The little creature then examined the new time to make sure it was a seamless join before returning its tools to their rightful places and reversing steps toward the edge of the monitor from where it had emerged, carrying the jar in a sack pulled out of a back pocket. Just about to disappear at the edge of the screen, it looked outward and saw Matilda staring at it, wide eyed and open mouthed. It stopped to wave and smile, then vanished. Matilda let her breath out in a whoosh! She must remember to reenact this vigil in the fall. She needed to know just how the little time collector returned the hour exactly to its place. 

In a warehouse somewhere, there are shelves of jars, each containing an hour sliced and preserved from all those time zones that observe DST, being carefully curated, until they are to be put back with no indication that they'd ever gone missing in the first place.

Words

 “Traditionally we begin every new session with words,” said the group leader.

“Words?” asked one of the members.  “What have we been using up till now?”

Words.  We have been using words, units of language, to capture ideas and pith them in display cases, pins stuck with surgical care fixing them where they can be seen and admired.  Words, taken separately and enjoyed for their iridescent casings, frilly antennae, delicate wings, glowing with a luminosity of their own, pulsating with an inner beat, words for their own sake, as jewels, as poetry.  

But we take those words and, like jewels and bits of precious metals and shining beads, thread them on a string, join them together so they are not individuals awaiting our scrutiny and admiration, but a colony, a line of ants toiling together with purpose, performing the task of story telling, of description, of making a garment out of threads.  

We cannot tell a story without words.  They are not always audible; they may be a string of images, like pearls, forming in our minds when we watch a ballet, or listen to a piece of music.  We give the abstract meaning through words, labels to first-encountered objects, to new experiences.  We talk about those experiences, make them into our own stories through the use of words.

The young mother revisits the details of her child’s birth.  It is a tale she never tires of telling, for someday her child will want to know his origins, and she will be ready with his story.

It is language, words, the joining together one after another of nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles which gives us the stuff of our lives, and when words begin to fail us, when we stop mid-sentence, unable to continue because the next bead to be strung has evaporated, or has been replaced by a black hole that creates an impassable lacuna in our train of thought, we start to panic; for we equate loss of words with the first signs of dementia, of decline which leads to the inevitable silence of death.

The story continues, is told from one generation to the next, and words are its vehicle.  Polonius asked Hamlet, “What are you reading?” and he, on the verge of madness, voicing a lament of the discontinuity of life ended too soon, the orphan forbidden to mourn, answered, “Words, words,” and slammed the book shut, for that story was over and done, as his own sentences unravelled into their disparate parts.