Time and Again

On Sunday of this week, I posted It’s about Time – and never got to say as much about time as I had planned because I ran out of time.

As I have mentioned, I was recently reelected to the Board of Directors of my housing cooperative – Morningside Gardens in New York City. I won’t go into the politics of it, but I am currently the first Vice President and it fell to me to preside over the monthly board meeting last week. The main business of the meeting was on a topic of great interest to many of our cooperators and I found the technical and the psychological preparation for the meeting to be both demanding and time-consuming.

These days I feel pulled in several directions – in New York, I am trying to bring order to my study – a long-standing project. Then here at Heart Lake Liz and I have a project of organizing things in our cottage. When we bought the cottage in 1987 from a cousin, it was filled with the possessions of my great aunt Esther, including some family memorabilia and items of genealogical interst. Then in 1988, we were basically wiped out by a fire and so we had to start over (fortunately, most of the genealogically important material survived.) We rebuilt at a very low cost, and have gradually been making improvements. Each set of improvements has caused disruption, as things were moved around.

For example, this spring we had a lot of finishing work, including our kitchen, done by a marvelous contractor named Brad Hall. In order to do the work in the kitchen, Brad had to move everything, So now we have an improved work space with new cabinets – and we have to put everything away – in fact, we have to establish a new system of organization.– sort of like after moving.

We still haven’t recovered from the disruption made by earlier improvements – not to mention the stuff we moved here from cleaning out my mother’s house. So it’s possible we will spend a lot of time organizing while we re here to enjoy relaxing, being away from the city, and generally letting down.

I am also pulled in other directions – towards this blog, for example, and towards trying to keep up with other blogs, especially in the progressive Anglican blogosphere. Then there is my literary side – I have more or less stalled on the Alexander Pope project, though it hasn’t gone away. My reflections using the lens of Dominic Crossan’s writings have slowed down also.

People in our building in New York use several shelves in the laundry room as an informal book exchange. Recently Liz found the second and fourth movements of Anthony’ Powell’s A Dance to the Music Of Time. Each of the four movements consists of three of the twelve novels that make up the entire work. I first began reading Dance over forty years ago and read the last few novels as they first appeared in US paperback editions. I am now reading it again. The action takes place over a period of about fifty years as the narrator, Nick, goes from schooldays to early old age. Flashbacks and recollections extend the time covered to more than sixty years. It's a marvelous work and seems to fit my current mood.

That’s all for now. Next time, I'll still be on the topice of time.