Eventually I knew that time was not on anyone’s side, let alone mine. It was not, as the human mind imagines, a kind of subterranean stream following along in parallel, a happy bubbling compliant brook. That year, time had broken out of its former muzzled existence as a sequence of languid forty-minute school periods. I slept during those lessons. I read Tolkien. I dreamed of white foam creaming on a beach. I ate coffee scrolls at the back of the classroom. Now, only months later and school finished for life, time ran my life rather than accommodating it. A Copal clock radio sat by my bed, its rectangular face shedding eerie green light and its mechanism infinitely flipping numbers, like a slow-motion poker machine. It had a wood-grain pattern trimmed with plastic chrome around the edges, like a Cortina’s dashboard. It woke me in darkness with the faltering but carefully enunciated syllables of the early morning Learning English program on 3AR. Or it wove bits of song into m...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.