what do you know about time?

Back in mid-April, at Beach Haven, when sweaters were de rigueur and wet hair dried in chilly crisps, when I rose early to meet the dolphins, when I tried to get away but work kept finding me anyway—back then, there was this woman by the sea.  A retired school teacher, she told me.  Never married.  The kind of person who only ever reserved rooms in hotels where dogs are welcome and where you can bring a little pan of some pre-concocted stew and heat it.  She was an off-season Beach Haven regular.  She liked to sit in an old beach chair, its plastic weave gone slightly awry, with a fishing rod poked into the sand.

She liked, she said, to sit all day.

And from what I could tell, she did.

I liked how comfortable she was alone.  How unafraid of time just passing.  How dutiful she was in her self-commissioned role of watching the sky and sea change.  I wondered if I could sit like that, if only for a day, and if, at the end of the day, I would better understand time, know more than most about what it is to measure out the hours.

I think of her now, when all I really want is to sit and read and (every now and then) look up and study a bird or listen to the chorus of the angry hot cicadas.