Time will Tell

While a collective, disassociated insanity continues to shriek into the wind of a conjuring storm of what I can’t help but call America’s collusion of morons, I sit here and think, not only has America lost her moral compass, she has let herself go. She needs a major makeover and a good a therapist. Easy enough to find these days on Instagram. My feed is filled with them. Face lift surgeons and self-proclaimed healers of all sorts.

In reality, since all I can do at best, is try and help myself, I gratefully have a therapist to help me navigate the madness. And, oh yes, swimming. While movies and tv shows have always been my go-to for escapism, I’ve once again rediscovered the zen of swimming.

After decades of don’t wanna mess up my hair, I took swimming back up this past summer. To heck with my hair, I declared to no one there. When it came down to a choice between keeping my sanity, or keeping my hair looking styled, I chose sanity, as in lap swimming in the amazing Olympic sized outdoor pool at the J.

However, one thing I realized while swimming this summer, besides appreciating old fashioned chivalrous men, which has nothing to do with nothing in this conversation, I’ve also kept my fondness for old fashioned clocks. Not the digital kind that feels like a ticker tape ticking down the time till doomsday, but the sort you hang on a nail embedded in the wall. One that has a long hand and a short hand and even sometimes a second hand. I’m just nostalgic that way.

I noticed in many places where I frequent, the wall clocks are all gone. While I often find myself wondering metaphorically, where has the time gone? In this instance, literally, at the outdoor pool, where has the actual time telling wall clock gone? Have wall clocks gone the way of cursive handwriting? Can children even read a clock with hands anymore?

While swimming my laps I have to strain my already aged and compromised eyes to read the digital clock that now sits at the end of the pool on a picnic table if the lifeguards remember to put it out or if it is not overheated because, oh yeah, climate change.  I understand if you are in the Olympics and the winning race comes down to a split second; a digital clock is what you are looking for. However, I just want to look up and see a simple clear as day teller of time to know when I need to get out of the pool. And for this old broad who couldn’t care less what people think of her wearing a two piece, is it too much to ask for the old-fashioned simple on the wall clock right by the snack stand where it used to reside for 25 years, please come back? Can some things remain?

Well, apparently, yes, it is too much to ask. I found this out when I brought up the idea of placing a clock back on the wall in a staff meeting and was surprisingly greeted by a cockamamie story of how the clock blew off the wall in the wind. Have I just landed in OZ? I think not. That clock survived a multitude of tornadoes and high winds over the years. How did mankind manage to land a spaceship on the moon and yet a simple wall clock is apparently too much to ask to be properly secured on a wall?

Well, here we are, and here I am. My little moment at a staff meeting asking for a simple, readable clock (not digital mind you) in a logical location to be riveted back on a wall in my mind revealed the much bigger problem of the status of this country in which we live. In a world that has dispensed of all logical, and reasonable requests for the betterment of mankind, you know, like peace on earth and lowering the price of staying alive on all levels are met with cockamamie tales of no can do, I’m beginning to see connecting correlations.

Hey, I’ll bite the bullet if I’m the problem. An older person stuck in the past and in the way of progress. But what is progress these days when the world is at such odds? Sit in any staff meeting and the microcosm of the world will reveal itself in no time. So be it if a digital clock that one can’t read in the sun, sitting on a picnic table is the way of the future. Far be it from me to beat a dead horse with an old timey clock.

Hey, I’m just trying to swim some laps to keep my sanity and get out of the pool in time to get home and watch the next episode of As the World Burns…I mean turns.

One thing I do know though, is whether my request is fulfilled or not, only time will tell.