What Time Is It?

What Time Is It?

 

Don’t ask me? I gave up wearing a watch months ago. Here in the tropics there’s a whole world of time difference, it's an entirely different temporal reality. An hour’s drive north of here, where the ugliness of humanity begins to show itself, marked and disciplined time begins again. For those who care about such things it’s also known as Eastern Time.

In my part of the tropics it’s tide time, sun time, and night time. I once heard this place referred to as a drinking town with a fishing problem. I can’t disagree. It always seems to be 5 o’clock, though I personally like to wait until after lunch. Meal times are flexible, but I have yet to enjoy beer with my morning eggs. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to enjoy a cheddar and mushroom omelet with a beer.

Time morphs with the sun. Sometimes I’ll be sitting watching the mangrove islands while intermittently reading and writing. The whole visual definition of the islands change, and the sun imbues them with color, depth, and texture. I fail to note the passage of time because the view moves through time with me. There is only the moving sun, and the passage of tides to give you any sense of temporal motion.

The world outside doesn’t exist if you don’t want it too. You have to go in search of it. There are TV’s in the bars, but they are, inevitably and predictably, locked on sports channels. The only TV’s I’ve seen tuned to news are the ones in Radio Shack and Kmart, and even then I never… 

 

… saw anybody standing around watching.

Sorry, I got lost there for a while. A great white heron is wading through the shallows in front of me and for a few minutes I just lost track. I’m learning to allow for sufficient “distraction time” in my day. I can’t expect to get much done, so I don’t.

Every few days I make a trip into “town”, such as it is. That means driving about five miles up the road to a small collection of strip malls that are the commercial “centre” of my tropics town. I get beer, groceries, and occasionally gin.

The only acknowledgment I make to the passing of time involves a very large martini made from Boodles, vermouth, splash of bitters, and a fresh lemon slice. I’ve heard scurvy is a constant threat in the tropics. I don’t have martini glasses so I use a big wine glass. I sip it down as the sun goes down. The sun plays against the clouds over the Atlantic, painting the ever changing formations in whites, oranges, reds, and gold’s. It’s a passive and natural drama that inspires and challenges me to describe, so except in the most general terms I don’t.

Every day I have chosen to acknowledge the unusual passing of time with a toast to God, as painter. It’s the best way I’ve found to salute the very nature of time here in the tropics.