For decades I worked Monday, through Friday, mostly 7:00 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon. Occasionally there were some later afternoons, and a scattered, infrequent weekend. Mostly though, it was the model of consistency, unvarying. You couldn’t set your watch by me, but you could probably set your sundial, and you could easily set your calendar by my vocational coming and going.
Then I retired.
I became adept at staring into little spaces of time. It was the absence of substance that, at first, was intriguing. I saw the transience of life in the fleeting, failing, forgotten units of time. If I looked hard enough, I could see the past, the present and the future, all there inside every passing flash of time. Then it became eerie, puffs of emptiness, rising from substance-less ashes. It was slowly blocking my vision, clogging my sense of smell. Life began to lose meaning.
I always knew the day and the date. I made a point of checking the calendar on my iPhone in the morning. Coffee, a few news stories, a glance at Facebook, Words with Friends, time and day and date. It was still something, a responsibility, a self-affirming set of movements, a daily grind. There was no commute, no deadlines. I could check the day and date whenever I wanted. But I had to check, daily, sometimes more than once, just to be safe.
It wasn’t long before the routine became dull, soft around the edges, time began to crawl. It lost meaning. I got up in the morning, and I went to bed in the evening, and… There didn’t seem to be anything in between. Seconds, minutes, hours had nothing to measure against. It was one long unit of time, a day, nothing else.
I began to experience pronounced signal degradation.
I’ve started to look at time differently.
“What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.” The words of Saint Augustine, started to make sense. It was something, I read somewhere, a long time ago, filed them away and forgot. It had no meaning, not then. Now it began to make sense. As if I learned a new language, accidentally.
Time was still a constant, it lasted forever.
I decided to find something to do. Something with people, goals, definitions, requirements, cemented into compact knots of reality. Anchors to a world that had forgotten me.
It had been years since my last job search. My first steps on a distant moonscape. I decided to take the first job, or volunteer opportunity that darkened my phone. It turned out to be in retail. A small store, with big signs, rotating stock, changing seasons, a widely disparate but comfortable cast of characters called associates (which would make a great name for a band, Tim Clark and the Associates). As a group, they are divergent and varied, and delightful. From a high school student, the son of immigrants, who told me with such excitement about his new iPad, he was getting ready for college, to the other senior citizens who have become kindred spirits, to the store managers who probably are getting weary of my constant questions and calls for assistance. I’ve started telling them all, when they come to help me out of my latest jam, that they are my favorite. Because, as the man said:
“You know, all the act is wearing thin
As the crowd goes uneasy, and the boos begin.”[1]
Managers are people, and sooner or later they will get tired of hearing that. I’ll have to come up with something new.
The store is open 7 days a week, from 9:00 to 9:00, and there are always tasks needing attention, all day, every day. Thank goodness for careless, casual shoppers.
My work schedule comes in an email, Friday or Saturday, for a week that runs Sunday, through Saturday. It changes every week. I could work in the morning, afternoon, or evening, it could be any day of the week. It changes constantly. It can be from 4 to 7 hours each day, any day. It’s absolute chaos. I don’t know who I’ll be working with, or what I’ll be doing each day. Perfect for the anarchist in me (another good band name, Shopping Anarchists).
Time began to take form, metastasizing into a different shape. My weekends are variable. This week, my “weekend” is Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, who doesn’t love a three-day weekend.
Sometimes, when I’m manning the cash register, I find myself wishing customers a happy weekend on a Monday. Their odd look and the tilt of their head serves to remind not everyone considers weekend as a user definable term. “Have a nice remainder of your week, I meant.” Or “feel free to enjoy my weekend.” And the always reliable, “Sorry, I lost track of time, it happens whenever one of my favorite customers happens upon my register.” People love that one, even though they never believe any of it, they all know they’re all my favorites.
Every workday is different, different coworkers, different times, different managers, certainly different customers. Despite the differences, every day is the same. Going to work, or not going to work, depending on the day and the schedule, and the whimsy of allocating labor, resources and time to meet the demands of retail.
Seconds have become parts of the minutes again. They march into the hours which assemble into days. Days assemble into weeks and months. Months, always odd constructions, have returned to their strange allocations of days. Shades have become colors again. I can’t help noticing the planet has taken on a rakish tilt, knowing the rotation and spin have become stable. And you can thank me for that.
[1] Sealion, from War Child by Jethro Tull.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
