Going Inkless

Living with teenagers is a lot like living with raccoons. You see them rarely by the light of day. Most often you only hear them skittering and clattering around in the middle of the night, and you wake to find the house in disarray. Things go missing and turn up in the most illogical places. Remnants of their snacks are left scattered in the living room or found stashed around the nest, tempting other vermin to the party. If you do encounter one and make a suggestion as to how they should amend their behavior, you just get the blank stare. At best, they will pretend to comply, but the charade is dropped or the lesson forgotten as soon as you're not forcing the issue. There seems to be no end to the messes, literal and otherwise, you're left to clean up. Technically, we have neither raccoon nor teen in our house. Our son is officially just beyond his teenage years, though still not old enough for all the privileges of adulthood. But, despite the date on his birth cer...

"How do you expect to come loose in time when you pay so much attention to the clock," I've been known to say. Usually, I say this jokingly to my husband when he grumbles about coming in a minute or two off his estimate on some matter of timing. He's got a very good sense of it, and misjudgments of time don't happen too often. The inferences in my comment are three: A. Coming unglued and sliding around randomly in time as we know it would be desirable. B. The things we use to gauge time, the clocks and watches and calendars, have power over time itself. C. I am somehow less encumbered by the concept than most, and I am in a position to offer advice on it. These are only partly true. While coming loose in time might seem like a scary proposition to most, you would have to admit it probably wouldn't be boring. Imagine visiting any point in your life or in time as a whole, times from your past or future, other eras in history. You could revisit gran...