Long ago, it was as important as learning how to read.
I look at the analog clock on the kitchen wall and feel a strange comfort I don’t get from the green LED digits on the electric stove and microwave. Maybe it’s because round clockfaces with moving hands were all I knew growing up. One of the first books I remember reading was a book on how to read the time on a clock. Telling time is what it was called back then. You learned how to tell time on a round clockface with moving hands at the same time you learned to read and write. It was that critical a life skill.
Of course, it’s not needed at all anymore, what with cell phones and digital displays of time and temperature everywhere else. And it really a great loss? No. But that clock on the kitchen wall is the best ten dollars we’ve spent in a while. I might put some more up throughout the house. They’re a comfort to this old man, who will take all the comfort he can get amid the future ruins of what was once his country.
I should practice writing in cursive while I’m at it. I haven’t done that in a while either, except to sign my name. Anything for a dopamine hit. If practicing a lost art that will be well and truly lost with my death feels good, how bad can it be?
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