Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 18, 1990 TAG: 9003222320
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LIZA FIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The past few years in particular were thick with articles and lectures on "quality time" - that rare time one spliced from the schedule to spend with the family. The idea was that, since career-minded parents and computer kids were generally too busy to waste an hour together, swatting a ball or running through the park with a kite, families needed to absorb from their brief togetherness as much quality as possible.
That meant meaningful caring and sharing, frank sex chats, educational museum visits - whatever yielded the greatest meaning in the smallest while.
The term itself seemed to oppose the decade's general focus on flat quantity; it implied the possibility of unseen depth - a hole, like pulling open the door to a clock.
But as the purpose of opening that door was to procure all the "quality" possible before clapping it shut again, the notion proved little different from anything else on the productive schedule, and not a hole punched through it.
Our decade needed a hole, a space void of getting and spending our possessions, time included. The key to the center of time still is, I believe, that bit about wasting an hour - something I recall doing by the dayful as a child.
Wasting time, in fact, was our prime family activity; it came of the mentality that time would pass anyhow, and was of such value that nothing you swapped it for could put you ahead in the bargain. So we rode roughshod on ours, let it sail over cliffs and burn with the supper and sink with rocks in a creek.
As children in the '60s and '70s, my brothers and I had yet not learned to separate productive and leisure time - elements the '80s have sharply defined even for children. We had no idea our family life was largely wasted, unquality time, perhaps because our parents didn't tell us.
They did teach us to play poker on a Friday night: how to cut the deck with a slap, and rake in the rubber chips with indifference. They taught us to say prayers after breakfast and tell tales, rarely with a lesson to them and often spiced with exciting lies. Meals were long and wasteful; you came to the table on time, morning or night, and stayed there no matter how the phone rang or who had homework - until the meal and stories were done.
On Saturdays, we rose at the crack of dawn in order to squander as much time as possible in one day. The early hour was not our own idea but that of our shiftless parents, who loved to meander on dirt roads and railroad tracks. My mother knew the names of some flowers, or made them up, but we probably learned nothing more than a few Wild West songs and how to spit far.
On winter Sundays, we took our old clothes to church, with mud-spattered skates and coffee thermos, and rode from there to our friend Hammond's cow pond. It was a prime way to waste an afternoon, falling down in the reeds, drinking the bitter coffee, hitting a hockey puck that Hammond's dog ate one day. We certainly never accomplished anything out there, but for a giant heart we once scored in the blue ice with our blades, which caught the sun like quartz and which is still etched in my memory, a view from the scrubby hilltop, at dusk.
Sometimes we wasted the weekend in whole clumps; we would camp from Friday afternoon to Sunday, with no clock, and no sense of time passing beyond the noisy creek. It was not even productive, adventuresome camping, but usually at one foot-worn spot called Arcadia, in the Jefferson National Forest. You hung in a hammock, looked for arrowheads along the road, or sat in the creek with the crawdads, feeling the cold water pass forever through our armpits. Once we spent the whole morning burying coals and beans in the ground; we'd heard Indians had done it. Supper tasted like cigar smoke and caves and was perhaps not worth the sweat, but we remembered it.
Our father lived under the delusion that camping in the trees was as important as his job at the railroad office. One summer when he lacked vacation days, we lived a week in Arcadia among the gnats and a kitchen of sticks and twine lashed in the trees. He rose before dawn each day to wash his head in the dish bucket and drive into town to work, then returend at suppertime with a carton of milk and sat in the creek to read the newspaper.
We even camped on New Year's Eve once, an excuse for my parents to back out of the neighbors' party. The snow in Arcadia was nearly a foot deep, and we trudged up the road with some moldy Boy Scout backpacks and the beagle, along the roaring creek. Of all our irreverent abuses of time, this must have been the most arrogant: snoring through the change of year in a pine-tar shelter.
In the middle of the night (we didnt' know the time, but later imagined it to be the very hour the town was shooting firecrackers and popping champagne), we all woke up to dead silence. The creek had frozen still, in the blackness; all motion and life seemed halted where we lay cold and foolhardy, clumped together in our old thin flannel bags.
The beagle, meanwhile, sniffed up a skunk under the shelter; the frozen darkness suddenly grew wild with odor, and stayed that way till dawn. The fumes followed us down the buried road the next day, like the exhaust of our spent and ended year.
Even after we had washed the dog in whiskey and hung our clothes outside for a month, we could smell that fume, and see the white forest, and hear the frozen creek.
by CNB