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Mar 9, 2023·edited Mar 9, 2023Liked by Luigi Cappel

I don't know why (oh, I probably do) this story made me so emotional. Certainly something to do with clicking on Cher and having that soundtrack playing while I kept reading. The other night I was talking to Bobbie about love languages and she reckons there isn't a love language more valuable than time... and it was a lighthearted conversation but it's stuck with me all this week; especially the feeling of regret when time has not been invested well (like looking back and wishing you'd paid more attention to people/things that you were soon to lose). Yesterday I came across a poem in a zine about a watch that stopped ticking.... it was about a man who was always late for dinner and how his wife resented it... but it wasn't until she was gone that he realised what he'd sacrificed. For me personally, being on time has never been a big concern (in fact I loved living in south America where being hours late was really not unusual) but as i got older and began to understand how my being late impacted on others (especially socio-culturally) I have tried harder to... basically not be an asshole!! On the other hand, when I am late, I know that it's not because I don't care about other people, it's that I am an incurable optimist and I fully think I can fit in everything and my calculations are always based on best-case scenarios.!! Anyway, thanks for the nostalgic post, I lolled at those Dutch phrases - how beautiful language can be.

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Thanks, Nadine. If only we could condense time so that we could go forward and learn. I had a number of revelations regarding my upbringing, a few, while my father was still alive, but most after he died. I think that if he understood where he was coming from himself, he might not have come down so hard on me, and in turn, I wouldn't have been so resentful, at least about some of the things he did. Instinct, especially coming from near starvation, is totally going to impact what you do, even after the circumstances that caused the instinct are long gone.

I am fascinated by time, wrote a song about having a time machine, and what I would do, and risk if I used it.

My grandmother, Elizabeth Augustin was a well known writer in Europe and also a prolific poet. She wrote a poem, maybe similar to the one you remembered. She published it in a small anthology translated into English called Making Up For Time Lost:

bedtime

she couldn't bear

the ticking

of the wall clock

stopped the pendulum

now the hands

always point at

eleven o'clock

she didn't mind

for now it was

always bedtime

and she would never

grow any older

She stopped her clock just before her 99th birthday. I hope I have her genes :D

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