Dancing In Time

This morning I caught a glimpse of my oldest granddaughter running across the yard with our dog. Just for a moment in time, I was lost in thoughts about how time is always the constant wheel in motion, just like she seems to be, and how very real and fleeting time can be. Before we know it, she'll be a grown woman.

I wonder too if someday she will look at her own grandchild and wonder where her own youth and where all those years have gone? Will she have marked the times of her life largely with what is real and what has value? Or, will time have slipped away like the sand in an hour glass?

Years ago, down in southern Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, I visited an elderly distant cousin --- Tante Marie Euphrosine Navarre. She was ninety-one years old at the time, and was a true throw-back to old time Cajun practices in how she passed the times of her life. She was just as old-fashioned about how she measured time too. She had only one clock in her house, and it was frozen in time, having been stopped deliberately on the day her beloved husband died.

She owned no watches or any other clocks. She neither wanted any, nor would have any, if they had been given to her. She did have a stick stuck in the ground out in her garden. A day with her was stepping back in time to when time really meant making the most use of the time you have.

When primitive man began to think about the passage of time, he found some measures in nature. The succession of light and darkness gave him the day. The variations of the moon gave him the month, and the change of the seasons, and the varying number of hours of daylight gave him the year.

People noticed, of course, that the sun seemed to rise out of the earth or the sea into the sky, and then to descend again. Some great thinker noticed that the shadow of a cliff or a tree reached almost the same place every day when the sun was high in the heavens. It was easy to place a small stone at the point reached by the shadow. So now there were three points in the day -- sunrise, midday, and sunset.

The nest step, perhaps, was to trace the curve of the shadow and mark other spots upon it. This was the beginning for the sundial, which was for a long time, the principal device to show the passage of time.

The division of day and night into twelve hours, and the division of the hour into minutes and seconds, was made by the Babylonian priests who really knew a great deal about astronomy. It is possible that the Egyptian obelisks were pointers of immense sundials.

"That's me shadow stick," says Tante Marie Euphrosine, as we walk in her garden. "It lets me know if I've been out in the sun too long."

"Bet you never thought about your shadow being one of the two gifts that Dieu gave us? she implores.

Knowing that she will forever think of me as a city girl, I slyly give her the appropriate answer, "No, but I bet you could tell me about those two gifts."

Rolling her eyes, she gave me the answer like she would for anyone who needs a Cajun Country Guide for Dummies book.

"Yer born, with two suitcases you can never loose. One's the shadow of death that you carry with you every day, and the other's the shadow of how you use the time you are given in life."

I laughed back then when Tante Marie Euphrosine explained it to me, but the wisdom was not lost on me then, or now.

One of the ways in which people told time, was by fixing a stick in the ground and marking the spot reached by the shadow. This moves around the stick, becoming shorter before noon, longer after.

Actually a shadow stick is a very versatile thing. It can be anything that casts a shadow, even a person standing. There are some who have used their flagpole as a make-do shadow stick -- as anything that casts a shadow consistent enough for the sun throughout the day to move around it can be used.

Remember that in the morning the shadow stick casts the longest shadow towards the west. By noon when the sun is at its highest, the sun will be directly south (in the northern hemisphere) and directly north if you live in the southern hemisphere. At this point the shadow stick will be at its shortest length.

With the shadow stick, as time moves towards the late afternoon and evening, the shadow stick's shadow begins to lengthen towards the east.

A candle marked in equal sections in black and white, so that each section was burned in a given time. Alfred the Great is said to have invented this way of measuring the passing of time.

Known as candle clocks, they were a popular way of measuring time even as far back as in ancient Asia through the Dark Ages in Britain.

The majority of them were generally kept at being a foot tall, with even markings that determined segments of time. Sometimes this was numbers, other times it was different colors or lines. Others used the method of sticking nails or other objects at intervals and as the candle melted and released the item, they knew that a certain amount of time had passed.

I think my favorite of the candle clocks are found in the use of ancient Chinese candle clocks. They used incense and candles to measure time. With the passing of each measured time, the scent of the incense changed. I'm thinking how pleasant it must have been to think:

"I woke up to the smell of vanilla, and now I've been laying in bed for an hour because I smell cinnamon. Might be time to get up because the candle is making me hungry."

As the candle melted past each mark, the owner could guess fairly accurately how much time had passed.

Note: I did not share my candle clock knowledge with Tante Marie Euphrosine, lest I be accused by this very religious Catholic, of being into using voodoo candles of spiritualists in New Orleans.

There candles are sold to encourage marriage between a couple and the measurement of time is really about how much supposed time and work needs to be done (i.e. nine sections for nine days of burning).

Another method of telling time by night. A hemp rope was knotted in regular spaces, and lighted at the bottom, smoldering slowly and regularly. This method of marking time was still used among backward peoples until less than seventy years ago.

Now, to me this is one of my favorite ways that people used to measure time -- only because some had a few amusing ways of signaling the time passed in their knot making.

I'd first come across the use of knots for measuring time back when I was all consumed with genealogy. An Acadian relative had used a knotted hemp rope for measuring the number of days he'd been held prisoner on board a ship and another had used a hemp knotted rope to measure the time waiting in the darkness.

Later in researching this, I found that the Chinese method was far more interesting. It was the Asian version of a poor man's alarm clock. They placed evenly spaced knots on a rope for the amount of time that they wanted to sleep. Ropes of different materials burn at a certain amount of reliable time through to the next knot. All they had to figure out was how many knots for how much time.

Then, they would place a stick at the end of the rope and place it between their toes. Apparently, when you awoke to a hot foot or flesh burning, your rest was up!

Now, the European take on this method of measuring time seems a little more reasonable. They simply tied up metal objects (like fishing weights) inside each knot.

Then, they suspended the whole rope contraption over a brass pan. With the passing of each measure of time, the weight would fall and hit the pan. Guess I have to giggle over that one, since the dripping of a leaky faucet -- might be just as amusing as listening to a Clunk! or Boing! throughout your sleep would just be as resting.

Every time a section of rope or candle was burnt through, or an hour glass turned, the owner, cut a notch on a stick to mark the hours of vigil passed.

This was a natural progression in measuring time because for thousands of years, many cultures used notch calendars to mark the passage of days in a year or a given period.

Since almost every aspect of life since time began is based around time, it's the awareness of time and the amount of time that has passed that seems important, even if as individuals many were not aware of the exact time.

Long before the clock was invented, many cultures felt the need to measure time. Sometimes that was about religion -- to mark the times for certain prayers or for religious meetings. More necessary were astrological and measurements needed in terms of sea voyages.

An hour glass, like an egg timer -- one end is filled with sand, which pours through a hole into the other end. It was once used to measure sermons!

Other names for hourglasses are:

• Sandglasses
• Sand timers
• Sand clocks
• Glass watch

Known to have existed since the 14th century, they were often used in the work place, especially in early factories. This was especially true in the artisan trades like glass blowing and metal working.

In their heyday, they were heavily used on ships to measure speed or thirty minute passages of time. They were used in conjunction with knotted ropes or time sticks to record the amount of combined time that had passed. In fact, the speed at which a ship traveled, known as "knots" evolved from this method of recording time, speed, and distance.

They are still in use today but more as food timers or for motivational devices in educating children.

Time sticks -- when a master and a man wished to keep a record of time for wages, two sticks were used. The servant brought his part of the stick, and the farmer compared it with his own.

One can only imagine the conflicts of having two different time sticks measuring the same amount of time. I'm quite certain that the employer always won if there was a dispute.

In some cultures, such as Tibetan, the priests relied on time sticks much like they would a sundial. Some of them were very ornate, with a time scale, and complex enough to include recording time and the months of the year.

Oddly enough, Tibetan time sticks were also combined with the task of being a priest's walking stick.

Time was measured for ages by placing a small dish or a round basin in water and boring a hole in the bottom of it, the water flowing in, and gradually sinking it. This always happened in the same period of time, so that men knew the time when the water-clock sank.

Various forms of water clock or clepsydra, as the Greeks called it, were also used. In some, water dripping from a large vessel into a smaller one raised a float, which pointed to the hour upon a column.

In others, the float as it rose, turned a wheel to which a hand was attached. This pointed to the hours upon a clock face very much like the ones in use today.

Still in others, a trickle of water fell on a little paddle wheel which made a hand go round a dial. Some of these water clocks struck the hours.

There are very few people who have not seen a sun dial, either on a house, or on a pedestal in a yard or park. The dial is marked, and the time is told by the shade of the pointer falling on the different numbers. This kind of clock is not dependable because on rainy days, without the sun's rays, it does not tell the time of day at all.

In the course of time, various methods which would be of better service in a house, on a rainy day, or at night, were invented.

The tiny rush light holder, was used before candles were made. Back in the 17th century, rush light holders, indeed held "rushes." Since that's not a term many today would be familiar with, a rush light was a common meadow rush that grew in marshes. They were still in use up to the 20th century in some rural places.

The outer skin of the rush was stripped away. What was left was the pith, that had been dried and then dipped into hot animal fat. Most were made of fat from sheep. This was the forerunner of the candle. After drying, the rush was clipped into a rush light holder.

Such rushlight holders were often a combination of a rushlight clip and a candle holder for lighting up a room after dark.

Mostly known as a "poor man's candle" they were very popular. Some were even adapted to burn more like a chandelier with several rush lights to light up a dark room.

This is a primitive watch. It was always held in one position, and the sun, shining through the little hole, fell upon one of the numbers engraved inside the circle, as shown here.

Being able to tell time accurately was so important that in 1714 the British Parliament offer a reward to anyone who could invent an accurate clock suitable for sea navigation. Back then sailors and ships were lost because they were lost or crashed against rocks when unable to determine their exact navigational position.

Keep in mind, that for every minute a clock lost, the ship was off course possibly by as much as fifteen miles.

A movable sun dial which can be held up so that the sunlight shines through a tiny hole in the straight piece of metal, and lights up on of the figures engraved inside the circle, which is placed at a right angle to the straight piece.

Finally, since Tante Marie Euphrosine was still puffing away on homemade cigarettes at ninety-one -- I've often thought about the other way of measuring time that is not recommended.

Only the older generation would probably remember that cigarettes have been used to measure time. During WWI and WWII the expression "take five" had to do with knowing that it took approximately five minutes to smoke a cigarette. Our government even spent money to study this phenomenon (why doesn't that surprise us?).

They also claim it was the time that a nervous performer or music an needed to calm their nerves by smoking a cigarette.

Like Tante Marie Euphrosine, in my friendship with Old Man Papadopoulos, he told me:

"During WWII back in Greece, we'd knew the distance and the amount of time it took to walk from one village to another, by smoking one cigarette after another all the way. My wife's village was a three cigarette hike. I'm not sure she was worth it."