Rainey Blogs on Some Days

My Grandma Rainey always used a couple of anachronisms that now make sense to me as I've gotten older. She'd say my dad was born on “Armistice Day,” referring to Veterans Day when they disputed about his birth date because she insisted that his birth certificate actually listed the wrong date for his birth. (She ultimately went and had the birth certificate legally corrected to win the argument. He was born on Armistice Day!) And on this Memorial Day weekend, I now remember that she always used the term “Decoration Day,” which was the name for Memorial Day until she was 50 years old. That’s actually not a crazy thing to say, but I remember thinking it was at the time. Growing up in my house, we had an icebox to keep the food cold, but it actually wasn’t an icebox. It was a refrigerator, but the old names for things sometimes take a while to be discontinued from use. Somewhere along the way, I stopped using “icebox” but I do not remember when. All I know is that I think we o...

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life I have to admit something: I am obsessed by the passage of time. It is a constant presence in my life, as if I have some allergy that results in irritation or an itchiness that I must constantly attend to. I am constantly paying attention to the passage of time. I have no idea how this happened. Here's an example: I do not really want to be celebrated on my birthday like so many do. I prefer to take the day off from work and contemplate, not be rushed, sip the coffee slowly in the morning, sit by a stream for a little while, anything but be glad that I am another year older. The changing of seasons, say from summer to autumn, is also an emotional experience for me because I see it as a kind of dying, an ending to something that is now being lost. I wish I could see the new season as a new beginning, but I do not. I focus on ...