When there was a time for each thing

 

 "From the position of the bed, my side recalled the place where the crucifix used to be, the breath of the recess in the bedroom in my grandparents' house, in the days when there were still bedrooms and parents, a time for each thing, when you loved your parents not because you found them intelligent but because they were your parents, when you went to bed not because you wanted to but because it was time, and when you marked the desire, the acceptance and the whole ceremony of sleeping by going up two steps to the big bed, where you closed the blue rep curtains with their raised-velvet bands, and where, when you were ill, the old remedies kept you for several days on end, with a nightlight on the Sienna marble mantelpiece, without any of the immoral medicines that allow you to get up and imagine you can lead the life of a healthy man when you are ill, sweating under the blankets thanks to perfectly harmless infusions, which for two thousand years have contained the flowers of the meadows and the wisdom of old women.

- Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 74-5.

Today's reading took me back to that time when we knew it was six o clock as the Angeles rang out and we stopped play and left our friends for home. It was dinnertime and then light reading and bed by nine-thirty. Morning was four thirty o clock for my mother and five-thirty for me. The day ran along the sun's trail across a tropical sky in a perfect arch above my home to set at six-thirty in the Indian ocean.

Lunch in the cool living area before the western veranda heated up in the afternoon sun. My father read after, on the side veranda, Time Magazine or his book, dozing off as he sat. My mother on the sheltered corner of the western side would smirk, commenting on how two verandas allow one to know the other is there, without confronting a face. Three o clock meant waking up and slowly making tea, getting out crackers and cheese and bringing clothes in from the line and locking up the doors and windows in the kitchen and garage area at the back. Many little duties too numerous to mention and the quietening of noise and radio by six. Not much TV but programmed first for young children, then for adults after eight.

You could hear yourself breathe, listen to conversations, gaze at the trellises and patterns in the ventilation grill elaborately designed especially for our home in 1952. You saw the sunlight move and the shadows fall. Best of all, you sat in the gloaming, in the twilight, on the porch steps while your mother sang Love's Old Sweet Song. There was a time for each thing.