In Time

We now sit a third of the way through winter.  Happily this writer now dictation guru, also sits inside in 68 degree splendor and aside from very limited use of my hands, the keyboard isn't "mashed" (as they say in the South - mash that key) by fingers shaking from chill.

Music's simple definition is "sound in time". Sound we get - anything that makes noise.  Time is a different issue. Is it your heartbeat or the second hand on the grandfather's clock - or perhaps something even less regular.

Was thinking about my dad yesterday as he would have been 109 on Saturday.  1910, his birth year, was a Halley's Comet year if memory serves me.  His great grandfather was born in 1835 in northern Vermont and that, again was a Halley's apparition (that's what they call comet appearances - apparitions).  Our next, by the way is 2065 - don't wait up.  My dad did see Halley's again in 1986, his second "tick of the comet clock" something that his grandfather didn't see unless he had his eyes open at birth.  I saw the last one in the 80s, but won't see the next.

I am drawn to a flame like a moth,  thinking about these cycles and events - occurrences of nature that keep track of time.  For persons who were born in 1835 after the comet's passing, if someone hadn't written the event down he/she could go a lifetime and never know it existed. We tend, instead, to measure time with things that come a bit more regularly; winters for instance.  Moons (full ones or no moon nights) as well. Even sunrises and sunsets.

For some reason I enjoy music that doesn't seem to have a sense of time...music that appears to sound motionless....obviously the opposite of a Sousa March....although I love a good march and when I could walk without some assistance to our downtown, I could go through quite a few of them in my head, note for note, 120 beats a minute - marching time.  I still make sounds but am losing the time part.

But its also cold and motionless outside.