Tempo Rubato: Random Thoughts about Time

tempo rubato: “robbed time”; an expressive way of performing a rhythm; flexible in tempo

Keeping Time

In the summer, the fog ambles down the street past my windows, so solid it almost has legs, so thick that I can barely see the eucalyptus and pine trees across the street. I can’t see the valley spread out down below us, or Mt. San Bruno on the other side. God has taken a giant eraser and rubbed out everything further than ten yards from the house. There is no sky, there is no sun, there is only a dying low-watt lightbulb, suspended in the void. Some days, I can’t even make out the lightbulb, only a dull glow that comes off the gray above me. Morning, noon, dusk — it all looks exactly the same. When I look up from my desk, out the window, I have no idea, on those days, of what time it is. And so I’ve learned to keep time by the neighbors.

Steve, next door, drives off to work while my coffee brews. Brad, across the street, leaves to catch the bus about the time I finish my cereal and sit down to work. Brad’s wife Anna takes their two year old, Luke, out for a walk in the late morning, just as the ink in my pen and the ideas in my head run dry.

Before Luke could walk, Anna used to carry him up and down the street. She would stop at bushes and power poles, or at the crest of the hill, then point at things and name them.

“Leaf. Pole. Sky.”

As he got older, Luke would point in whatever direction he wanted to go. From the throne of Anna’s arms, he would point at bushes and cars that he wanted to stop and examine. He would point down the street, then across the street, then, after a while, back to home.

Making Time

Every day at 3 pm, I used to see a man come out of a house a few doors down, a clarinet in one hand and sheet music in the other. He would cross to his car, which was parked across the street, and get in, rolling up the windows securely. He was a fairly tall man, his height exaggerated by his thin build, but he had a tiny car, a late 80′s Honda Civic Hatchback, I think. He would fold himself into the driver’s seat, prop the sheet music on the steering wheel, and play his clarinet for an hour or so, curled up like a comma, before returning to his house.

His car windows were shut tight, and so was the window that I watched him from, peeking out from behind my computer monitor. I couldn’t hear what he played, and I always wondered: are his housemates jerks, or is he really bad? Certain instruments should only be practiced outside, but clarinet isn’t one of them.

Carnegie Mellon, where I went for grad school, has a bagpipe major. Bagpipes are definitely meant to be played outdoors. I can remember coming to campus some mornings, especially near mid-terms and finals, and hearing their distinctive drone from out on the track field, or someplace else that was far, far away from most of the classrooms. I actually like bagpipes played that way, from a distance, early on a gray, cold, morning. The sound, deep and shrill at the same time, bounces off hills and the walls of buildings, until the echoes surround you and you can’t tell where the sound is coming from, or even quite how many pipes there are. I’m told that the Scots and Irish played bagpipes while marching into battle, to intimidate the enemy. I bet it worked.

The tuba is an outdoor instrument, too. When I first moved to San Francisco, I used to see a man practicing his tuba on the median of Dolores Street during rush hour. He stood all alone, under the palm trees, and played as traffic rushed by. At first I thought he used the traffic to mask his playing, but now I wonder if it was for the company. A lone bagpipe sounds defiant, self-sufficient; but a lone tuba has a lonely sound, rather like a lost elephant calling for its herd, as the homeward-bound commuters zoom past on both sides, heedless.

Killing Time

An elderly couple lived down the hill from us for several years. I’d guess they were in their late seventies or eighties. They both had skin with the leathery texture that comes from being in the sun too long, and they were quite tan. They owned a house, but really, they lived in their car, a light blue Oldsmobile, at least twenty years old. They kept it parked in front of their house, facing downhill to overlook the valley.

The car never moved; it only sat in front of their house. But they were always in it, all day long. Whenever I passed by, the husband smiled and nodded through the rolled down window, then went back to contemplating City College campus down in the valley, or gazing across to Mt. San Bruno. Sometimes, he dozed. His wife read, or dozed, or sat silently beside him, watching the cars driving by below on Monterey Boulevard. I can’t remember ever seeing them speak to each other.

Everyone on the street accepted them, as if it were all perfectly normal. The mailman handed them their mail through the driver’s side window as he made his rounds. In all the years they lived there, I only saw them out of the car once. They were sitting on lawn chairs on their front walkway, watching — silently, but with great interest — as the woman across the street re-landscaped her yard.

Eventually, the couple and their car disappeared. About a year ago, though, as I drove through the nearby hills, I saw another man, in his early sixties perhaps, sitting in a car parked by the side of his house, windows rolled down, staring out towards the ocean.

Losing Time

When I first started working at home, Anna was still pregnant, and not yet showing. At the time, I wrote a story about a modern day Peter Pan, a man who couldn’t grow and change, even as his wife and children grew beyond him. I wrote, and I polished, and I watched Anna get more and more pregnant. I sent the story out a few places after I finished it. It never got published, but I got some encouraging feedback from one of the editors. I put it away, intending to get back to it.

The story still sleeps, in the back of a drawer. And Luke walks. He is almost too big for Anna to carry. He toddles up and down the sidewalk, Anna trailing behind him, and when he points at things, he utters sounds that soon, very soon, even I will recognize as words.

“Spider. Car. Bird.”

I watch him stoop to peer at the dirt beneath a hedge that grows next to his house. I watch him, and I wonder. In the time that Luke has learned to recognize faces, to point, to babble, to walk — what have I accomplished?

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