Time

We didn’t discover time, we invented it to suit our obsessive-compulsive need to control and judge and quantify everything.

I know this when I drive down Montfort Heights, park my car and sit in front of the little brick bungalow where I was born many decades ago. Yes, the driveway wall is sagging, the wooden shutters are warped.

But wait: There sits my mother in her favorite rocking chair on the porch, crocheting lacy doilies, while apples simmer into sauce on the kitchen stove, and white sheets flap in the breeze on the backyard clothesline.

I am five, curled up on the studio couch in our musty basement turning the gilded pages of Mother Goose or exploring the garden in bud. It is Spring again and daffodils have barely survived an unseasonal snow. My father has cranked up the Philco radio in Time for Opening Day.

Then a car passes by mine on the narrow street, a stranger pulls back drapes at the front-room window jolting me into the present — which is now which means it must be Time — though there’s no such thing — to turn the key and move on.