Friday Free-Write

Time: 1:26 P.M.

Location: An elementary school in Japan

Friday afternoon. I find myself in a teachers’ room sitting at a desk that faces a map of the neighborhoods surrounding the school. It’s divided into numbered and color-coded districts, from one to twenty-six. Students are gathering in the hallway outside of the office to clean. Their shoes squeak as they walk across the floor, and their voices ring out, some are muffled and echoing in the distance, some are near and clear.

The teachers’ room is mostly empty. The other teachers are scattered throughout the school, overseeing the mixed-grade groups of students as they clean their designated portions of the school, some sweeping, some holding a dustpan, others bent over a wet towel, their hands and the towel touching the floor, running down the length of the hallway.

I, being an employee who is sent to various schools throughout the week, am exempt from this. I could, of course, join in the cleaning, or walk through the halls engaging students and keeping busy, and when I first took this job years ago, that’s what I did do; however, these days, I tend to just hunker down at my desk and work on other things.

When I walked into the school building this morning, I sensed that another week had gone by. I realized this in a way that is hard to word well. I realized it as a sensation that I suddenly felt in my body because I found myself back at the same place that I had been the Friday before this, and the Friday before that, and the Friday before the last Friday before that. Working at different locations on a regular basis does this to you. Rather than process the information mentally (It’s Friday again, so another week has passed.), you begin to make sense of the passage of time physically (Here I am, in my Friday location, so another week has passed.).

I don’t know if other people process the passage of time this way or not. When I was younger, I worked construction for a few years. For stretches of time, I would often go to the same location to work and suddenly that location would change, often to a place that I had never been to before. Sometimes, depending on the weather and the type of work at hand, there would be no continuity at all. I would find myself at a new job site every day, or moving from one familiar place to another throughout the day, delivering lumber here, caulking windows there, picking up tools from one location and bringing them to another. I don’t remember processing the passage of time the same back then. But then I again, I was younger, and I hadn’t yet become a father.

As I get older, I find that time tends to blur into one seamless moment. Each day is the same day, and this day is not linked to the seasons or anything else. I often find myself surprised to see snow outside in the winter, thinking on some level, why is there snow on the ground in summer. Then I take pause for second to recollect what month it is. Oh, that’s right, it’s February. Hmm … that’s strange, why did I have the feeling that it was July?

Tomorrow I will wake up at 4:00 and start the day with a cup of coffee. As I drink coffee, I will do what I do almost every day. I will study French for fifteen minutes. After that, I will work on my latest drawing until it is time to take a shower. After that I will fold the laundry, make breakfast, and wake my family up.

Today I was at my Friday school, so I will know tomorrow that I have more time to spend on my art than usual. On the next day, a part of me will understand that it is Sunday because I didn’t work on the previous day. Then the following day, I will know that two days have passed since I last worked, so I will go to my Monday school, where my body will sense this passage of time in a strangely physical sort of way. And again, though it is no longer Friday, I will have the sensation that another week has passed.