(Author’s note: The following attempts to capture a recent four days in time and about time with as much accuracy as possible. Minor details have been changed to protect privacy.)
I walked from my apartment to the elevator, going past a dozen or so doors on the way. It was early afternoon, and I could hear a TV blaring in nearly every apartment as I walked past. In a typical apartment building, most folks would be at work, but here in this building a noticeable number of the residents are home all day with little to do other than to watch television. I was used to the sound of TV as I walked past, but right then it was much more noticeable than usual.
I live in what is generally referred to as “tax-credit housing”, meaning that the property was built under a federal program that grants a 30-year property tax credit in exchange for renting the units for well below market value and only to those who make less than 60% of the area median income. As a result, the building is composed of a noticeably varied range of working-class and poor folks, from single moms and working families with kids to retired folks who live on Social Security, as well as a significant number of disabled folks, including several war vets, who also live on fixed incomes. There are also several multigenerational households, where younger relatives work while their elderly parents and/or grandparents are at home during the day for the most part.
I stepped into the elevator, where a man was awkwardly leaning in the corner, propping himself up to relieve pressure off his leg, which I noticed was in what looked like a permanent brace.
“You ever watch that Kardashian show?” he asked me as the elevator door started to close.
“Nope,” I replied. I don’t have a TV.”
He looks at me in amazement. “You don’t have a TV?” He looked me up and down. “Well, I suppose you don’t need one. You’re young, you can go amuse yourself in the real world. Twenty years ago I thought I couldn’t afford cable. Now I realize I can’t afford not to have it.”
I nodded. It had occurred to me often as of late that the very fact that I can sufficiently keep myself occupied to the point where I did not need a TV was a significant privilege that many of my neighbors did not have.
“My nephew criticizes me, tells me I’m wasting my money,” he continued. “I asked him, what else am I supposed to do with it? I get a little over $700 a month plus my food stamps and whatever I can get returning cans. $595 for rent, $40 for electricity, $20 for a big bag of dog food, after that I got well under a hundred dollars left to amuse myself for the entire month. Can’t even afford a respectable drinking habit. So cable it is. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but it is. Cable and my dog, that’s what keeps me occupied.”
“Makes perfect sense to me,” I said to him as the elevator door opened into the lobby.
He nodded. “Thank you, I need to hear that. My nephew, he’s the only blood family I really have around here but he’s so judgmental. The kid doesn’t understand how easy it is to think the way he does when you’re bringing in $50K a year. He goes bowling, goes to the movies, goes to the coast. Doesn’t know what its like to not be able to afford all that, and then lectures me for how I spend my money. He doesn’t think about the fact that his time itself is worth money, while my time doesn’t hold value for anybody. ‘Time flies’, he says to me. Not for me it don’t.”
I looked at him sympathetically as we walked out the front door. “You know what’s best for you better than anyone else does,” I said to him as we parted ways.
As I walked on, his words rang on in my head, as they illustrated the core divide that the sound of the TV had come to symbolize for me as of late: the divide between those whose time had a market value, and those for whose time did not carry a transferable value and was often regarded as a burden, as the enemy, as something that needed to be intentionally wasted and consumed in the absence of a meaningful way to spend it. For some, time flies, while others are in constant need for time to fly away.
* * *
I was sitting for a moment just outside the library when he approached me.
“Hey, you got a smoke?”
I’m not a smoker nowadays, but I still carry cigarettes sometimes, deeply aware of the power that tobacco has to initiate random conversations with strangers. I handed him one and he lit it up.
“Ah, thank you. I’ll tell ya, it’s the only addiction I have left, but this one’s manageable and I’ve stopped trying to give it up. I gave the rest of them up, I still need something, you know.”
I nodded and he continued.
“My counselor said to me many times that addiction was a demon. I could tell that she meant it as a metaphor, but over time I’ve come to realize that it’s literal. A heroin addiction is the ugliest of demons – it’s a beast inside of you that you constantly need to feed, and feeding it becomes your utmost priority over time. But time is the key, time. An addiction also eats the time, and gives purpose to the time, and time itself is another demon, one that also eats away at you. And as screwed up at this sounds, in the face of the demon of time, the demon of addiction is actually a bit of a comfort. Simply put, it gives you something to do. You wake up, and the first thought is that you need a fix. Immediately you have a task, a goal. Something to do with your time. Something to take care of, something to feed.”
“How’d you kick it?” I asked.
He pointed down towards the corgi at his feet. “After I finally got through rehab, I got myself a dog,” he answered. “Figured having something else to feed would keep me out of trouble. And it did in terms of smack, but I didn’t stay completely out of trouble and after a while I collected a wife and then a kid as well. So now I have a houseful of creatures that howl to be fed in the morning.”
He paused for a moment and smiled. “But at least they’re all external. And I love them all dearly. I’d rather feed kids and dogs than those other demons. But often it’s better to feed demons than to be left to the whims of the father without sufficient distraction.
“The father?” I asked. “You mean God?”
The price of a conversation. [Photo by Alley Valkyrie.]
He put out the end of the cigarette. “The tricks of the Father are endless. Time files sometimes, but never when you want it to. A winged demon, that Father Time.”
“And that’s no joke, that’s real as you and me.”
* * *
“This next sequence will run for four minutes.”
The strange patterns of beeping noises started again, and I closed my eyes and desperately tried to relax, trying to block out absolutely every aspect of the current situation. As I had discovered in the past, if I ignored the headphones and earplugs and panic button in my right hand, the coldness and the brightness and the very fact that I was in a cylindrical tube, if I blocked out all of that successfully, for a split second it was almost as though I was just lying down listing to some sort of avant-garde techno music.
I held the illusion for a moment, until the beeping shifted to a faster-paced and much more jolting rhythm, which snapped me back immediately into the realization that I was currently in an MRI machine. I think this is why I don’t like techno, I thought to myself.
“This next sequence will run for two-and-a-half minutes.”
I closed my eyes once again and tried my best to pretend that it was a just techno-tunnel.
When the final sequence was over, it struck me how 38 minutes in a tube, broken down into 2-4 minute segments that are announced step-by-step, makes for one of the most accurate flows of time that I experienced as of late. As uncomfortable as it was on one level, it was exactly as long as it seemed, as long as it was supposed to be without the catches and loopholes that are often present in time. The ‘tricks of the Father’ were conspicuously and surprisingly absent this time around, which considering the circumstances was quite a relief. For once, time seemed a strange constant.
They pulled me out of the tunnel, took down some additional information, and told me that I would hear back within a week.
“I know that the waiting is the hardest part,” she said to me, sympathetically. “Time can be especially cruel that way…”
I thought of the man that I talked to that morning with the dog outside the library. Time can be cruel in many ways, I silently whispered to myself.
“Do you need a parking validation?” she asked.
“No, I walked here.”
She looked down at the screen at my info for a moment, and then looked up at me again. “That’s a quite a bit of a walk,” she said to me.
“Yeah, it took a while. But I find it a good way to clear out some time.”
“Must be nice to have that kind of free time,” she said.
Trust me, its not nearly as nice as you think, I thought to myself, and thought hard for a second before answering
“Yes and no,” I said to her after a moment. “Free time tends to lose its value and appeal once its no longer being weighed against the time you wish you didn’t have to spend elsewhere. Eventually, it becomes somewhat of a liability, especially when you don’t have adequate ways to waste or spend it. I’m grateful in a sense that I’m able to spend the amount of time that I do walking around Portland, especially considering how many folks I knew with mobility issues who don’t have such an option. But the time itself isn’t always a good thing to have, especially for those who can’t get out as I can.”
She looked at me, silent for a moment.
“Huh,” she finally said. “I hear you. I never thought of it that way before, but I can definitely see what you’re saying.”
* * *
I dragged a chair and a small table out on my patio, intending to spend a good portion of the afternoon making pinch-pots while watching the traffic below me.
My upstairs neighbors started watching a TV program about UFOs, which I could hear clearly from where I was sitting, and before I realized what was happening I found myself sucked in. I forgot about the clay in my hand as I strained to hear their TV above the sounds of the traffic while staring out mindlessly towards the street below.
Out of nowhere, their dog started to bark uncontrollably, which set off the dog next door and another dog nearby, and the neighbors either muted or paused the TV while yelling at their dog to shush. I snapped back into reality, and as I listened to the chorus of barking dogs I looked out and noticed the doggy day camp van pull up in front of the luxury condos across the street. I had noticed the van many times before, but seeing it in that moment brought with it a whole new significance.
I tuned in to the cacophony of barking throughout the building for a moment, dogs that for so many folks here were instrumental in giving their time and their lives meaning in the face of very few accessible amusements or comforts.
And as I listened to the barking, I closely watched across the street as the van driver walked the dog toward the building, the owner approaching them from the other direction. In stark contrast to my upstairs neighbors who spent most of their waking hours caring for their dog with the TV blaring in the background, this dog owner’s time is so valued under capitalism that he can afford to pay someone to amuse his dog for several hours every day while he’s gone so that the dog itself doesn’t get bored in his absence.
Sitting on the porch, staring across the street, I realized that I was experiencing two worlds at once, worlds that in the moment were being illustrated by dogs and separated and defined by the value and perception of time.
As the van drove away and the barking died down, they turned the UFO show back on upstairs. I started to listen in once again, but my thoughts kept interrupting my ability to concentrate as I couldn’t help wondering what a dog actually does all day at doggy day camp.
* * *
“Daddy, why is the market only open on the weekends?”
“Because during the weekdays, everyone is at work. They’re off on the weekends, so they can come here and shop,” he replied.
Sitting in the back of my market booth, the weekend ‘workplace’ that I’ve steadily inhabited for over a decade now, I tipped both my eye and my ear towards the direction of the conversation.
“But there are some people who work on the weekends too,” the kid countered. “These people here all are working right now,” he said, pointing towards the booths in front of them.
Smart kid, I thought to myself, curiously anticipating how the father would attempt to explain this particular aspect of class dynamics to a six-year-old.
“Well, yes, you’re right. Some people do have to work on the weekends.”
“But when do the people who work on the weekends get to go to the market?”
“I guess they just don’t get to go,” the father said after a moment. “We’ve talked before about how the world isn’t always fair.”
“Are the people who work on the weekdays more important than those who work on the weekends?
“Well, I guess some would say that. Those who work weekdays generally make more money than those who have to work on weekends, and there are many people who think that those who make more money are more important than those who make less money.”
“That’s stupid,” the kid said defiantly. “The people who work on the weekends should make more money, because they’re the ones who are missing all the fun.”
Portland Saturday Market. [Photo by Steve Morgan]
“If I was in charge, I’d have a market all week just for the people who have to work weekends,” the kid said as they walked out of earshot.
The father looked around for a moment, his expression one of pure helplessness and exasperation.
Right on, kid, right on, I thought.
* * *
As I watched her hand, moving so eloquently and furiously, I realized that I had seen her before, although in a different park on the other side of the river. She finished the bird with a few quick strokes and started to write underneath the picture in Chinese, quickly scribbling out a few rows of text in what seemed like seconds.
She then picked up the picture, blew on it, quickly looked both ways, and muttered a few words under her breath. And before I really understood what was happening, she pulled out a match and quickly set the paper on fire.
I gasped aloud, not meaning to, and she turned around, surprised to see me there. She nodded hello at me and I nodded back.
“It is OK, it is supposed to burn,” she said to me, smiling. “It is a prayer for the sparrows.”
“But you just spent so much time….” I stopped mid-sentence, recognizing the thought-trap regarding the value of time that I was about to fall into. She laughed.
“I have all the time in the world to draw things and set them on fire,” she said. “I am retired, I do not work. I do not like TV, I do not like bingo. Instead, I draw and I pray and I pay attention to nature.”
I stared at her for a second, wondering if I should say aloud what I was dying to ask her, then took a breath and went for it.
“Do you mind if I ask why? Why did you burn what you just drew, what was it for?”
She motioned for me to sit, and I immediately dropped down on the ground next to her.
“I draw them to ask forgiveness for the past. When I was a girl back home, one day our leader commanded all the people to kill the sparrows, all the sparrows. It was a matter of duty, of honor, patriotism, all of those things, to kill every sparrow we could find. So we did, we chased them, killed them, destroyed nests, some shot them out of the sky. Throughout my village, throughout the country, the people killed all the sparrows, every one they saw.”
As she paused for a moment, I thought about her age and realized that I was hearing a personal account of the Great Chinese Famine. My stomach clenched up as I anticipated what she was about to say next.
“But sparrows eat locusts and locusts eat grain, and when sparrows don’t eat locusts, locusts eat all the grain that is grown to feed the peasants. And then, after the sparrows were gone, after we killed them all and the locusts came, the droughts also came. And for years, there was famine, and millions and millions died.“
“Years later, I moved to America to be with my daughter, and everywhere I see different kinds of sparrows. And they reminded me of my childhood, of the famine and the death, and at first I was very angry at them. They almost felt haunting. But then I thought of what the people had done, and what happened as a result, and how all of the species are connected and interdependent. Here we both reside, me and the sparrows, and we are both alive, both survivors, and I don’t like bingo. So eventually I thought why not reach out to them?”
She smiled and looked around. “So I started coming to the parks, and when I see sparrows, I draw them and write prayers of forgiveness and send them up towards where I spotted them. I think it heals both of our wounds.”
I stood there for a moment, slightly shivery. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” I told her.
She nodded. “Nobody can change the past, but I can at least give them the time I have now. I often feel like I’m just wasting my days away when I sit at home, but then I remember the sparrows and I realize that my time has value.”
* * *
Walking back from the park towards my building, I noticed the man who has asked me about the Kardashians the other day, sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette. He looked up and I nodded; he waved me over.
“Hey, you ever hear of a time bank?” he asked.
Before I could answer, he continued, excitedly. “I saw something on TV this morning where they were talking about unemployed folks in Greece and how they’ve started these exchanges called time banks. It’s a bartering of services where if you can perform a skill, you can trade your time for the time-skills of another. Everyone’s time is worth the same no matter what service they perform, and services are traded hour for hour, no money exchanged.”
I nodded and he went on. “I’m one hell of a wood-turner. Put me in front of a lathe and I’ll make you some of the most amazing things you’ve ever seen. But I can only do it at most for a few hours at a time, which is why I’m useless to an employer. But if I could trade a few hours a week’s worth of my skill for, say, someone who could help me fix my car up or could repair my boots, I’d be so much better off.”
He pointed toward our building. “That whole place, I’m sure almost everyone can do something. But so many do nothing at all, because they’re trapped in their apartment with nothing but a TV and maybe a chat with the neighbor once in a while. What they know, what they do, it all just goes to waste. Nobody’s time has any real value as it stands.
“But just think of what we all could do if we all decided to start organizing ourselves and our skills around something other than money. You’d have a whole bunch of folks who think they’re useless who would suddenly find themselves quite useful again. We’d all have an easier time of it, a much easier time.”
“A much easier time,” he said again after a moment. “It always comes back to time.”
* * *
This column was made possible by the generous underwriting donation from Hecate Demeter, writer, ecofeminist, witch and Priestess of the Great Mother Earth.
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Very thought provoking. Thank you.
Beautiful…brought tears to my eyes. Time is relative. All is vibration. Even “money.” Which is simply “energy of the community.” Thinking of the loaves and the fishes. Thinking of the relativity of time. You are a teacher, Alley, in how to listen, how to be human.
Thank you, Alley. You know, it would take a lot of time to set up a Time Bank in an apartment building. I think you know just the guy to do it.
Damn. Yet another amazing slice of your life displayed in amazing prose.
What caused you to need an MRI? I’ve been with a friend to two of hers, and the first one was worse than the second–at least some progress, in staff and procedures. I sat outside, as a patient advocate, to speak for her firmly, and to get what she needed if she could not.
I’ll write more later: husband has just come to bed, and I must stop the clacking of keys unless I leave the room.
Wow. That was indeed a very beautiful, thought provoking piece. Thank you for educating me today! (And I actually got here in time to post a response – the comment TIME here is very short!)
I have the feeling I know you–do you come up from Salinas for halfas?
Come “up” where? Bay area? Frequently! Will be at CoS next weekend…
I agree with the gentleman in the elevator–that his nephew has little understanding of the differences between their lives.
re the gentleman outside the library: Mark Twain had a story about a man of many vices in a town where some illness made its way around. An elderly woman who was uprightly virtuous, had none, and the illness claimed her. The man of many vices gave up one, and lived. You should have a vice or two to give up, just in case–not keep a few, too.
The smoker had a witty attitude about time–liked that.
I love the way you are able to calmly show people different ways of thinking about a situation, the way you do here and in the medical office.
It helps if a dog left on its own most of the day can have a companion, as they really want to live in a pack. Our two older dog adoptees from 2009 (one survives) were an unrelated bonded pair, and while it was seldom that we were all out of the house at the same time, having each other helped. It also meant that there was no tense introduction period either. I would certainly feel pretentious having a dog at decamp all the time–but I’m not doing the 8+ hrs with 2+ hours of commute anymore. I had a cat, or she had me, and she managed in her own regal way.
That kid at the market–sure hope he gets to do things his way, to make things better for people, as he gets older. My son was known to make similar observations–but I don’t remember us being exasperated.
Thank you for the story of the sparrow-prayers. When I saw her burning the drawing, I knew it had to be a prayer.
There is so much here in general, but also which is directly relevant to my life in the last two months, and especially the last two days, since I just moved…
I looked at one of those tax-credit apartments in June–or, rather, tried to look at one–and when I initially called about it, they said “Are you employed?” and I said yes, and they asked what I did, and I said I adjunct teach at the community college, and they said, “Well, a single person renting a two-bedroom apartment can only make $38,196 or less a year, so I don’t think that applies to you.” I explained that I often don’t make half of that, and then they went “Oh, okay.” This notion that “college teacher” means “lots of money” is so ridiculous…In any case, I didn’t get that apartment for a variety of reasons, but I’m in a different one, which isn’t a tax-credit property, but which is entirely populated by low-income people. I just learned today that there is no recycle bin on the premises, which kind of shows what the property owners think of those who live here…
One of my younger sisters is a vice president of her company, and often works a few days a week from home. I do the same with online teaching, often only being in a classroom two or three days a week, but teaching online a little every day. She is paid a salary for her work, whereas I’m only paid for 4 hours a week per class, even if it takes 40 hours a week to do the work, which it often does. She is pregnant with her second child, and is now talking about getting a nanny for the days that she doesn’t work from home (and some nights if she doesn’t want to be bothered with baby things), and was talking to her rich gay neighbor friends who have several children through surrogates about what service would be best to hire a nanny through…which just kills me to think about.
All these people who don’t understand how adjunct online teaching works say to me “It must be great to have so much free time!” It would be nice if my “free time” were actually totally free, rather than being filled with the work that I am essentially doing for free in order to keep my contingent employment…
In moving over the last two days, I’ve been annoyed at several things. My firefighter/paramedic brother was helping me move today, and was looking at the old stereo system I had, which my mom got me for my high school graduation in 1994 (it was sleek and small and state-of-the-art at the time), and was berating me for having it, and also things like CDs and VHS tapes. “You should get a wireless speaker system for your whole house, and an iPhone so you can just use Pandora,” he unsolicitedly advised me. “How much does that cost?” I asked. “Only about $250.” (He was only talking about the speakers.) Uhh…I can’t really afford that sort of luxury, so I’ll just stick with my “old school” stereo, thanks.
It amazes me at how much those whose time is well-compensated don’t remotely understand how those of us who aren’t in the same position.