who knows where the time goes?
by alice owens johnson

“It’s not Daylight Savings Time,” my mother tells me over the phone, “It’s Daylight Saving Time.”

“You just like to underscore the saving part of the change,” I say. “It’s not a savings account; it’s saving the light, like somebody pocketing a miracle for when they really need it.” Then I throw down the gauntlet to my mother. “If you’re so clever,” I say, “where does that saved hour go?”

“Call me back,” she says.

I had just confronted mother with a double acrostic sort of challenge, the kind of mental gymnastic she loved and needed. When she entered the nursing home, the advice to us about our mother’s mental acuity was simple: ‘use it or lose it.’

But in truth, as I examined the idea of saving an hour of light, I didn’t know where the hour went, how it could be shoved into the cosmos the way I’d seen my mother struggle into a girdle. She was still all there, just pieces of her squished and hidden.

And so it became a challenge each year for mother and me to make up a fictitious place or a story about where the hour went into hiding. Sometimes the story was about what it did while it was gone. I often think mother and I were linked by a Celtic knot of storylines as well as bloodlines. My mother was a particular fan of Benjamin Franklin and was particularly pleased he was one to conceive of daylight saving; it was easy to hook her into the challenge of the explanation to the missing hour, much like a being a player in the evolution of a creation myth.

My mother was at her very best in verbal matches and games. Like the way she hustled folks into Scrabble, pretending she didn’t really know how to play very well. It took my ex-brother-in-law years to see how she’d positioned him so his gaze fell across the room in the direction of the television while she studied the letters on the scrabble board. He’d lose focus and miss a play and she’d cheerfully tally up the scores which sometimes mounted into the triple digit category. I also discovered she kept a secret notebook with words containing Q and X, and her favorite, Z. She was a word hoarder, a letter juggler. We could duel with puns for as long as an entire day.

As the day—the first Sunday in April—the day the disappearing hour approached, I was forced to play with time phrases: time wasted, spent, lost, found, past, future, folded, pressed for time, serving time, doing time, time flying, buying on time, time out, time to share, time saved and time to kill. Look at the expressions we use thoughtlessly: Take bed time,” I said. “Why honor a bed and not a chair or table? And what about dinner time and lunch time—they had their own time title, but no one mentions breakfast time.”

When you look at the situation,” I continued in another phone call, “daylight saving time is more about light than time.” This passage, like the equinox, signaled spring. But as I thought over the notion of daylight saving, it implies that up until April, we’ve been doing nothing but wasting time.

“I think I have a way of seeing into the problem,” I said one day. “The extra hour is like a pair of socks, the kind that disappear in your washer never to return. Where do they go?” As my mind played with the disappearing sock theory, I envisioned the socks following that extra hour somewhere into the cosmos—a bright, extremely long line of luminous socks and hours hanging out on line to dry in all that saved daylight.

For years we had explored the missing hour trying to decide if it had gone incognito or was simply misplaced like keys and gloves. As my mother reasoned, her missing gloves and keys had to be somewhere, didn’t they? It was fun toying with the concept of the saved hour the way Einstein played with time and matter, using day dreams, real dreams and cues from the universe to invent an answer to the riddle. She was sure she’d discovered the answer: the hours were somehow suspended in the universe inside bell jars alongside antique clocks and artificial flowers. Under bell jars, the hours remained preserved, hovering so they couldn’t become soiled and dusty. I liked this idea, so Victorian and proper. Time floating in the stillness seemed a fairly reasonable explanation—and the notion of the saved hour sealed in an airless jar made the reawakening of the hour in the spring so much easier to visualize, like a hibernating bear. Unlike the missing keys, socks and gloves, you’d know just where to find the hour. Or so our story went.

Once I returned from a day shopping, filled with inspiration. I thought I’d discovered how time was suspended as I jumped up into the air while riding in an Otis elevator. My ascent coincided with the elevator’s descent—voila, time suspension. I felt I’d found the rabbit hole entrance to the mystery of time.

Maybe that extra hour gets stored up for women in labor when they’d do anything for a tuck in time—it might be used like wampum, in some bartering system. Or perhaps the universe kindly hands us an armful of time for savoring, when our ultimate time limit, death, is approaching: time to figure things out.

Each year my husband and I go to Yucatan and enter the world of the Maya where the calendar is set at thirteen months. The thirteen moon/28 day calendar is a “perpetual, harmonic calendar.” The calendar is a synodic cycle averaging 29.5 days from new moon to new moon. Twenty eight days is the average lunar cycle.

Interestingly it computes like this: thirteen perfect months contain twenty eight days which equals fifty-two perfect weeks of seven days each. This adds up to three hundred and sixty four days and the three hundredth and sixty-fifth day is called “Day Out of Time” because it is no day of the week or month at all. According to a booklet I read, this day out of time falls on the Gregorian correlate date of July 25th and is a day for forgiveness and the artistic celebration of life and freedom. The harmony of the Mayan calendar versus the difficult calculations of the Gregorian calendar is simple and clean. No extra days or hours whining and complaining like petulant children at meal time. Olé.

I’m not good at vexing math. My favorite terms for simple addition and multiplication come from Lewis Carroll: “Uglification and Derision.” I like my life simple and clean like the Mayan calendar. But when I read about David Boehm’s complex discovery of the universe as hologram, I wanted to understand more. As I comprehend it, Boehm’s theory means time bends back on itself. For me, this concept was a William Blake moment of experiencing everything in a grain of sand, or understanding the phenomena of the Morton Salt girl spilling a galaxy of salt through eternity. Time bending over on itself in a twisted yoga pose was so visual I suddenly had a “Through the Looking Glass” clarity about deja vue. As I understood the moment, ‘time travel’ didn’t imply you’d had a past life, it was saying you are having a past life, right now, a parallel experience—remembering the future. I’m a visual kind of person and I likened the notion of time travel to moments barreling through a living room, a person jumping aboard like a subway train, and in London Underground parlance, minding the gap. The gap is, of course, where the British store their daylight saving time and the gap is where the past, present and future fuse.

But what about synchronicity? Is that where time bumps into itself like sleepwalkers groping down a corridor at night? And what happens to your sense of time when you meditate? Where does your self go, zooming through the atmosphere and hiding out with those missing hours?

Then I imagined all the lost birthday occasions for folks born on February 29th—Leap Year. What happened to all of those uncut cakes and gallons of melting ice cream? A party planet for the poor souls born on this day had some compensating aspects to it.
In another conversation Mother suggested the hour “wasn’t lost, because it magically reappeared in the fall, it’s simply displaced.” I picture a gigantic Archetypal Mother standing next to the clock in Greenwich, England, hands on her hips watching the hour scurry up the green like the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll; the rabbit glancing anxiously at his pocket watch as the day the time changes draws near. The eternal mother wags her finger and questions the wayward hour: “Where have you been?”

The fall and spring return of daylight saving also calls up the Persephone and Demeter myth for me, and while I didn’t mention it to my mother, it seemed to me that as mother and I spun out our time queries and fantasies, we were creating a parallel ritual of return. The advent of spring springing forward and autumn falling back kept us aware of time passing, calendar time we often didn’t always want to acknowledge. Mother talked about her advancing years at the age of seventy, even eighty but rarely mentioned getting older as she approached ninety. The time frame seemed more fragile to her, I suppose. She didn’t want to attract time’s attention.

The idea of what becomes of that hour is a Lewis Carroll puzzle I play with when I’m stuck in traffic. The ideas are endless. Best of all, it gives me a great opportunity to remember the way we engaged one another, mother and I. How our lives were strung together like those lost hours we could never seem to find, but we could always remember—our seasonal ritual of tale spinning—luminous hours I like to recollect, like those cosmic socks suspended through the universe or those hours preserved still and perfect in a dustless bell jar.

Alice Owens Johnson was born in New Orleans in the 1940s. She has published short stories and non-fiction in The Lyricist, Pembroke Magazine, The Guilford Review, and The O.Henry Festival of Stories. Most recently a non-fiction piece was included in the National Story Project anthology entitled “I Thought My Father Was God” edited by Paul Auster. Alice is currently writing a novel entitled Ash Wednesday about growing up in New Orleans in the 50’s and a non-fiction piece about New Mexico in the 1970s with the working title Sweet Water.
[ 828-669-0129;aoj1022@bellsouth.net ]