Sands of Time

Time is short. Opportunity is limited. Such is the wisdom of the hourglass.

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An hourglass sits on the table next to my morning coffee. It has no real function except to jump-start my mental focus until the coffee takes hold of the morning. In a speechless way, it’s superior to listening to politicians spewing vitriolic voodoo on marginalized Americans.

Today I recall words from MacDonald Carey, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of our Life.” They’re the prologue of the TV episodes, Days of our Lives, which ran from 1966 to 1994. Miraculously, there’s still sand left in its hourglass. If you remember it, then your hourglass is running low on sand, too.

My mother never missed an episode of this soap opera on her 12-inch black and white TV. She’d sit with her cup of coffee or tea and allow herself to be subsumed into the lives of the actors. If you lived in a small South Georgia nowhere town, you’d find your own escape hatch from the insipid boredom of the place. Soaps are better addictions than alcohol, except at night.

Someone gave me this useless glass filled with sand. They said it provided a better meditative process than the yogic Oom’s. Plus, they said, it wouldn’t disturb the household while sitting on the floor in lotus position, clothed in a white Indian loincloth and making a fool of myself.

For portending the future, the hourglass is inferior to tarot cards, horoscopes or even fortune cookies. I once cracked open a fortune cookie in the Grand China Wall restaurant after consuming a MSG-marinated General Tso’s chicken. Bad days need clear direction. The tiny fortune inside simply read, “See Rock City.” Direction can come serendipitously from strange sources.

Today, the hourglass seems like a bad omen. I sit and watch as sands of time slip silently into the bowels of the hourglass. The sand leaves no trail but slides seamlessly through the narrow neck, settling itself into nothingness. Like time itself, it leaves no trail in its passing.

Unlike Sullivan’s theorem, ‘form follows function,’ it’s hard to say just what function an hourglass performs. It’s useless as a sand clock, unless one subscribes to the notion that it’s one of Plato’s Perfect Patterns. Never heard of his postulation?

The peripatetic philosopher’s hypothesis suggests that in the heavenly spheres there’s a perfect pattern of all things, of which on earth everything’s an imperfect replica. It’s hard to get a grip on esoterica. Plato obviously never observed Ole Miss cheer leaders, or he would have seen the flaws in his speculation. Perfection is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

There are some trivial uses of the hourglass. I once had a small but decorative one, a ten-minute timer. The glass was encased in brass. It substituted for a stopwatch for timing long-winded, charge-by-the-word lawyers and boring preachers lecturing on the wages of sin.

Some say the hourglass is helpful for redeeming the time, an unproven and half-baked concept. Whistling Dixie does a better job. And if you think resurrection is possible in this body, remember, Cryonics is still a work in progress. I doubt we’ll see Stalin or Mao rise from their glass encasements any time soon.

I feel some remorse for the hourglass. It’s become mostly irrelevant in this technological age. It’s still good for timing 3-minute eggs. It was formerly good for describing the bodily shapes of peoples. But alas, even this use has run its course. American physiques are now mostly best described by the shape of fruit, particularly pears.

Perhaps the best use for the hourglass is in setting the mood for some figurative or poetic metaphor. Unfortunately, the sand has run out on writing this moronic post. Dream up your own.

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In the cosmic scheme of things, Time, if it exists at all, is measured by eons and not by grains of sand. As for us, well, it’s still dust unto dust…and it’s always later than we think.


Bud Hearn
October 18, 2018