Between a record-setting snowstorm that caused school to be closed or conducted virtually for an entire week and a couple of illnesses, Myron has gotten to see me work from home a lot lately. It looks pretty boring to him, aside from exceptions like one afternoon when he sat beside me while my coworkers and I replaced our faces with animal avatars on a video meeting and played an online game together. After that was over, I told him I had to do more “work work” and said he could sit next to me and play with some things on the desk or he could go off and play on his own for a bit, then we could play together when I was done. He can entertain himself longer than one might expect for an almost seven year old, but after he gets bored of reading and drawing and playing with dinosaurs and has pulled all the costumes out of his costume trunk to look for his gold-painted cardboard Shadow the Hedgehog bracelets, he starts asking,

“How much longer do you have to work?”

“I’m not sure, maybe 30 minutes or so,” I say, grasping for a sliver of hope that I can finish in that amount of time so that I don’t disappoint him.

“How many seconds is that?” This is what he asks when he has a hard time conceptualizing longer measures of time. If the answer is under 200, he might even count the seconds out loud, but his definition of a second is how long it takes him to count each number.

“Ugh, why do you have to work so much?”

I said something about having to make money to help pay for food and the house. I didn’t get into health insurance and saving for retirement. He was unconvinced.

When I put Myron to bed, I lay out his pajamas and set a timer for three minutes and tell him that’s how much time he has to get dressed. After the timer rings and I check back on him, I usually find him half-dressed and playing with something in his room. At that point this evening, he asked me while looking at a tiny catalog of the world’s smallest things like toy cars, action figures, and board games, “Why do you always set timers?”

I fumbled through arguments like how it’s important to get to bed before it gets too late so that he’s rested for the next day and how it’s important to get to school on time. Again, he was unconvinced. I tried to acknowledge that he had a point. I said that I know it’s good to play and wander and have moments when you’re not rushing or thinking about the next thing you have to be ready for. And he’s really good at that.

My first show with the Santa Clara Vanguard was about how time rules a person’s workday, but that day is punctuated by stretches where one loses track of time. The hornline and drumline made movements to look at imaginary watches. The color guard wore actual wrist watches that they tapped and held up to their ears at one point to check if they were still ticking. At age 19, I remember this character who is ruled by the clock being hard to relate to. These years of touring with a drum and bugle corps were mostly about being in the moment – performing and rehearsing to perform almost every waking hour.

photo credit, Drum Corps International

But over the years, I’ve become more like this character who constantly looks an imaginary watch. Myron is re-teaching me how to forget about time occasionally. I’m trying hard to get him to school and to bed on time without crushing his brilliant ability to wander, both for his sake and for mine.