Time & Eggs

When I was exercising the other morning, watching the clock, I wondered if the measured minute was diminishing in front of the second hand or expanding behind it.

I’ve been learning about time, how it passes slowly and quickly all at once, and how in a flash plans so long anticipated vanish into wafting memories. I gear up for the long weekend, for the trip to visit friends and family, or for the break from classroom routine, when all of a sudden, I’m back in my usual place. Or I dread the house cleaning, or jogging, or some other cumbersome cumber, and then just do it anyway, and flash! it’s over.

Young students, too, have a hard time comprehending time, particularly when it comes to adult time. “You’re 49, right?” one asked me last week.

“Yes,” I told him.

My colleague D, about whom I’ve written several times, is now up against time. Thinking with his head screwed on the whole way, he figured he’d schedule his hip replacement just before retiring, to use up his accumulated sick leave, which if unused would benefit him little.

Then he got a call from his surgeon. He needed to reschedule for two weeks later. Then he got another call from his surgeon. This time, it appeared, the operating facility was being remodeled, and so he would have to postpone the replacement for several more weeks.

“I think the surgeon is related to one of your students who doesn’t want to see you go,” I told D.

But D is a jovial character (in the photo he’s the pope, making rounds on a cart pushed by a student), and so he chuckled when he bemoaned his condition: “So I thought I had two weeks left, but now I have six!”

This past Thursday, D came into my room before school with two dozen eggs from his hens. “These will be in the fridge. If you want them, they’re $2 a dozen.”

“I’ll look to see if they’re still there before I leave this afternoon,” I told him. “I’d like to buy them.”

Minutes later, however, D was back. “I’m really bad at retail sales,” he said. On the way to the lounge, he’d crossed paths with a teachers’ aide who has fallen on hard times. “She didn’t have any money, so I just gave them to her,” he said.

As it may be said, carpe the diem, D.