Hours

 

Little hours of a very good film in which the world makes perfect sense for an hour. Little hours of walks in the gardens where curvaceous natives break the pattern of straight streets. Little hours of medium print an accomplished book offers, words every one an amazement. Little hours that put aside the war for a while, its menacing meanings and foolish arguments. Little hours of preparing dinner. Little hours are not little minutes of eating dim sims or chit-chat or winding down the car window to watch the houses passing by. Little hours are not days of planning for the party and going to the party and partying and going home from the party and getting on the phone next day to talk about the party. Little hours are by and large more or less productive in one way or another. Little hours of zoom sessions once in a while when there is a real motive for logging on. Little hours of a phone call talking about everyone else and not ourselves. Little hours of listening to old vinyl finds played again on the ultra-modern record player, filling rooms and passageways with their sixties instrumentation. Little hours of forgetting the terms of the pandemic, distancing and sanitiser and case figures. Little hours of doing nothing, as the expression goes, but getting something done. Little hours of visiting the supermarket, reading all the labels on the jars, and imitating the bellbird beeps at checkout. Little hours of train travel with the last of the fully masked, reading clouds above the embankments, and full-scale Sistine graffiti along the cuttings. Little hours of asking why that person deserves all the help they can get while that other person needs help but does everyone’s head in. Little hours of magpies patrolling nature strips. Little hours of Little Bourke Street at the rowdy restaurant, the one with the amazing noodle dishes. Little hours of accepting climate change and wondering why the government is run by dickheads. Little hours of dreaming about life before the personal computer. Little hours of siesta with the curtains drawn. Little hours of thoughts more or less one-syllable words that come and go one by one in some sort of line. Little hours of writing sentences about a searching sentence-writer who lived in the seventeenth-century, not that long ago. Little hours of dreams in which the people could be me or the people could be you. Little hours of weeding terracotta pots and bedraggled vegetable beds. Little hours that clock in at forty-two minutes or stretch to eighty-four minutes, and so on and so forth between those extremes. Little hours of actually tidying the room with its piles of papers and random clothing and discarded blister packs. Little hours of a coffee with a friend talking only about each other’s stuff, and another coffee. Little hours booked in the diary for next week. Little hours of breath.