Matter of Time

matt er of time Story by Katharyn Privett-Duren

For all it’s worth, New Year’s Eve meant very little to me until my hair began to fade to white. Oh, I loved the bubbles of champagne and the sparkling reprieve from winter’s bluster, but as an academic: I knew that there was a decided lack of evidence for the theoretical solidness of time. And so, as the midnight hour struck and drove bursts of confetti into the night air of Alabama, I would toast to the whimsy of the tradition and retreat to my bed, post-haste.

Somehow, time marched on as I slept, regardless of my faith in it. Certainly, humankind noted these moments to cure the abstraction of it all, marking them in order that they might harbor memory, life, and meaning. Kierkegaard would have approved of my position, I knew, and so I stopped celebrating the fi rst of January altogether.

And then, I found my gran’s watch. It had been tossed amongst the pins, cocktail umbrellas, and the bits and pieces of living that held no tangible value after her death. My fi ngers stretched the elastic band, an act born of tactile memory, as I was transported back to 1960-something: her hand on mine, quieting my squirm against a church pew, the steady tick of her watch counting down the minutes to freedom. She had worn it while making biscuits, shoved far up her forearm to avoid the fl uff of fl our. Her fi nger had tapped its circular glass window to measure my contractions, little beats against the hours that would bring forth her fi rst great-grandchild. Embedded just at the winding post was a fl it of gray string, marking a hasty retreat from her favorite sweater—perhaps, I hoped, just after hearing the phone ring on her way back from the garden. Was it me on the other end?

I wished it so with all of my heart.

Her weathered Timex had stopped marking her work, her coff ee time, and her soap opera rituals at exactly 6:30. I wondered if she had known that moment, if she had thrown it into a drawer in hopes of repair, if it had slipped into the soapy water of dinner dishes, if she had loved it too much to dispatch it altogether. The blur between the life that it had marked and its journey to my own hand was a rough saccade, and when it fi nally became still, my memories fl ushed into the space and fi lled it with the sweetness of her. A chronostasis of sorts

had hitched up the buckle and bump of all that had been, mending the wound with the smell of bread and butter, cedar and hand salve. And in that moment, all that had been of her nestled neatly in the palm of my hand.

I never attempted to mend the watch. Time had wound down for my gran, leaving the rest of us to mind the hour.

And yet, it remains in my jewelry box, somehow louder in its permanent pause. It is of no consequence that the arms of my gran’s watch no longer pull themselves together, nor apart. They had done so for long enough, winding their way through the pulse of her life with no regard to the waning of it. I inherited only a broken clock—a technological artifact created to tame an otherwise chaotic life. Yet, it was within this silent relic that life was captured in all its minuteness. Whether it be sunwise or widdershins (the olden terms for clockwise and counterclockwise), the spin of a clock’s hands reaches towards the places along the way where we have loved, lost, and stood against the rain.

It is only in the noting of its passage, I now concede, that time becomes exquisitely, viscerally real.

As the countdown begins to tick across the leftover tinsel and ribbon of another December, I find myself traversing back through the hills and valleys of the past. My own clock chimes against the dimming of the day, pulling me further into almost forgotten Januarys. In that pendulum swing toward a shiny, unmarked calendar, I can hear the ticking of my heart—and with it, the echo of all those who have loved me.

In the end, I will honor my southern roots. As the world rings in 2023, I will lay out platters of cocktail shrimp and spoon chicken salad into miniature phyllo cups. Our tree will still be all aglow, providing the only real light as my husband attempts to avoid the emergency room by popping the first cork into my favorite kitchen towel. Someone will beg for sparklers in those last breaths before the clock strikes twelve, and we will gather in the dark of the yard to count: ten, nine, eight . . .

We will shout it together, in widdershins fashion, until sunrise brings us back again. Somewhere between that moment and the next, our laughter will leave something of itself—breadcrumbs of a sort—for my children to follow back into the past and find us there.

And I hope that with everything that I can muster.

Even so, the Gregorian calendar doesn’t hold much weight for me as I grow older. I continue to be unconvinced that we have somehow wrangled time into neatly numbered boxes through which a measured continuum can, or even would, exist. It is (I maintain) only a beautiful dream. And yet, for just one night, the gears and spindles of that dream will find safe harbor in our hearts, carving the downbeat of those who have come before. There, if winter’s wind is benevolent, the call of “Auld Lang Syne” will ask us to remember the vestiges of yesterday before they are swept away by an alarm clock and the worry of morning. We will lean into those fresh hours, brushing our stretch against the sky, as if painting a memory for someone else to hold. It is a worthy endeavor.

For, as a broken watch once taught me, it’s only a matter of time.