Husbanding Daylight

The switch back to Daylight Savings Time will be here early Sunday, and I dread it. The coziness of wintertime is at least partly enforced by the long nights and brutal temperatures. Few of us want to spend hours outside working on projects with fingers bereft of sensation, and so we hie to our homes and gather in our quiet little familial groups and occupy ourselves with things that tend towards the soft, the mild, the legato. When the time of increased daylight arrives, the roads and shopping centers will be crammed with people buying plants and trees and sports equipment, and the car stereos will be louder, and the peoples’ attire will be more vulgar, and the season of the holy hush will again be shoved aside. And there’s the matter of the loss of an hour’s sleep, no small item for a man of my advanced years.

***

The sensation of epiphany is a pleasant one.

I had an epiphany tonight while watching something on television with my wife. I am at the point where I no longer realize when I am talking back to the screen because I do it every time I watch something on television. The vast wasteland is a target-rich environment, and I am not a strong enough man to resist taking shots at easy targets

I made an unkind and quite off-color remark in response to something a public figure said this evening, and my wife began laughing that cascading, beautiful laugh of hers, and I joined in. And it was at that moment that I had my epiphany. What I realized was this: as long as I am in the presence of my wife, I am a fool to think I can ever clean up my salty language. When I mutter my profane observations and she laughs, the arithmetic is simple: Delighted laughter = a good reaction, and a good reaction = irresistible.

The conclusion is obvious. My foul mouth is my wife’s fault. It saddens me to have to reach this conclusion.

***

I have been reading a biography of Flannery O’Connor, published back in 2009, and am finally beginning to enjoy it. The first quarter of the book was tedious due to the author’s overly detailed look at Miss O’Connor’s school years. Now that I’ve reached her young adulthood, the years in which she began to make a literary noise just as she learned she was dying of lupus, the pace has quickened and the writing has tightened up.

I was happy that this morning’s portion contained my absolute favorite Flannery O’Connor anecdote. She had accompanied the poet Robert Lowell to a dinner at the apartment of novelist Mary McCarthy and McCarthy’s husband, Bowden Broadwater. Miss O’Connor was her typical reticent self throughout most of the evening, but in the early morning hours, her tongue loosened for a brief but memorable moment. Mary McCarthy observed that she she had been a child and had received the host during Mass, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost. She went on to say that she had come to believe later that the host was a symbol “and a pretty good one.”

Flannery O’Connor, with her fierce and incandescent Catholicism, slammed the room silent when she said, “Well, if it’s just a symbol, the hell with it.”

How I would have loved to have been able to sit down and talk for a few hours with that little Georgia genius.

***

A sweet-smiling octogenarian lady put me in my place today, and how.

We were talking about the current cold weather, and the approach of spring just over the horizon. She asked me if I was planning to put out a garden this year.

“Well, I hope to put out a little one,” I told her. “I love working in the dirt, and we love fresh vegetables out of the garden. But to tell the truth, by the time I leave work in the evenings, I’m pretty much wore out. I don’t have the energy to work in a garden the way I’d like to, and the weeds can take the whole thing if I miss a day or two.”

The old woman smiled up at me. “Takes a lot out of you, does it?”

“Yes, ma’am. But like I said, I’d like to at least put out a few tomatoes. Maybe a pepper plant or two.”

She nodded. “Y’know, my husband still works in the garden every day. He breaks the soil himself, and plants, and he spends a couple of hours every evening out there during the warm spells.” She paused and smiled broader at me, her washed-denim eyes watching me. “Course, he’s wheelchair-bound, but he can get around on a walker for a little bit at a time. We have to help him down in the dirt, but once he’s down there, he’ll crawl around on his knees and work the soil with his hands and his little hoe. Yep. Spends a couple hours out there every evening.”

She couldn’t have said this to me in private. Oh, no. She had to say it in front of my smart-alecky coworkers. And they enjoyed the conversation. Very much.

I hope they enjoy their Daylight Savings Time. I hope they tend it. Like a garden.

~ S.K. Orr