And then suddenly

And then suddenly it's late September, or week four of the fall semester, and somehow the steady demands of life have yielded a gaping hole in this feeble attempt to create an online record. A week, two weeks: they melt, they evaporate, they - well, instead of grasping at verbs, let me quote from E.P. Thompston's famous "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," which I read today as a stunning sun arced overhead:

"[D]espite school times and television times, the rhythms of women's work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock. The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of 'pre-industrial' society."

Well, um, yeah - what he said. Only I'd like to see E.P. broaden his pronoun choice at least slightly, because any dad who has attended to a diaper change, or served up a snack between two other snacks to a hungry four-year-old, will also know the sensation that he's describing. 1:30? 5:30? A few days? Two weeks? Due to my cell phone, I always have a clock on me. But when I'm with Cleo that's not always the most relevant way of measuring time.

And yet we get by. Every now and then I sit down at our ancient piano and slowly shape arpeggio chords. Almost always, Cleo runs to join, leaps up on the piano stool beside me, and claims roughly 75 of the 88 keys as her own. She also introduces, inevitably, a new rhythm to my sluggish composition. 4/4 time gives way to something polyglot, something unmeasurable. But, too, I always end up smiling at the fresh chaos. No metronome would condone it, and yet. And yet.

So, yes, it's been 17 days since our last post. But now you know why. We've been attending to other tides.