On Clocks, Culture, and Me

On Clocks, Culture, and Me

It just turned 1900. I still have to drop the zeros and take away twelve to know what time it really is.   

I’m an American and it shows up in so many ways—not just when I open my mouth and you can hear my US accent—like, for example, when I am cooking for roommates and I ask what time they plan to eat.  

Such an American, time-driven, clock dependent question. Now they just look at me and smile, because though I know its a silly and probably unanswerable question, I still ask it, because I need to know when. 

I mean, it’s not just me and not just Americans.  The other evening, I walked to a bookstore for a book group and arrived exactly at the published start time, knowing full-well almost no one would be there yet.

Well, at the corner before the store, I ran into a friend from Madrid who also goes to the group. He was protesting that the organizer wasn’t there yet. We were joking about people’s perceptions of time and he kept worrying people would not show. 

About fifteen or twenty minutes late, he looked down the street and said, ah there come Maite and Pilar. They were late but they also were on time and showed up. 

We all went in and conversed as person after person arrived.  At some point, maybe forty minutes late, the organizer lured us into talking about the chosen book. 

Even after years of living in Latin America, I can’t say I really understand other than intuitively, Latin and Spanish senses of time. 

There are real differences that makes this Anglo more comfortable with Germans than with Latins; I seem to always mess up in what seems to be an imprecision of time. 

Of course, I also mess up with Germans. Today, as I approached an intersection with a red light for cars going my direction, I came up on a very blond, tall and slight man telling his three little blond girls that because the light was red they needed to wait for it to turn green before walking. 

Even though I understood, I didn’t even think about not continuing to walk since there was no traffic. I moved into the intersection just as three Spaniards on the other side did the same. 

But that is not about time, it is about following rules, these formal or informal norms that are established and recognized. Germans seem to fetishize them in ways I do not so much, even when there are laws at home about jay walking. My name should have been Jay. 

But the rule of the damn clock is built way deep inside me, so much so I almost never even think about it. 

I organize my day by counting back from timed obligations to make sure I will have everything done in time to meet them. 

My friends here seem to organize their day according to need as such shows up, or according to people. They tackle the day as it comes, rather than having a kind of schedule by time block as seems to lie behind my way of being, sigh.  

The rule is that latter kind of organization, especially in a place like the middle and upper-middle class United States where being organized is a sign of virtue and where day planners are a business model, even in digital form.

In all that, even in the shadow of the Franklin Planner Corporation—so many people I knew over the years worked there—I reached I a point where I refused to go along, to allow myself to be ruled by my cell or my laptop’s calendar with its schedule. I deliberately kept my schedule loose to allow for freedom without having to commit the absurdity of scheduling “free time”. 

Yet now that I no longer have to account for my time in a business day, i.e. a university day or week, I still find that looser form of a schedule dominating my life.  A schedule, not loose.. 

It may not need too but I run up against my deeply held notion that commitments of time to people or to institutions are somehow sacred. I know not every American feels that way but being in Spain, I feel the weird the degree to which I do. 

I seem to have a clock constantly running in my mind, such that when I awaken at night, I need to know what time it is and, thus, whether time—the all knowing marm of my life— allows me to go back to sleep or whether I may as well get up. 

It is a beautiful, drizzly day in Alicante.  The fall rainy season has started. It was evening when I started this note and is now morning, 0915. My desire to write ran up against an obligation to go home and make dinner for my housemates and me.  

Despite my rigidities, I think I’ll enjoy this day and its cooler air and moody weather that is unscheduled, even if the weather app thinks it can tell exactly when the drizzle will stop and start and if it will turn heavy.

I will remind myself that scheduled times here start later than written and that there often is an expectation things will go later. People also seem to expect to continue past the formal event to “socialize”, to just converse or to go to a café or bar for a caña, a draft beer, and to continue talking as the day wears on even if wet.