My father is obsessed with atomic clocks. Clocks in general, actually, but atomic clocks in particular. He even got me and my brothers atomic clocks and atomic watches! The way they work is that there is a main atomic clock out in Colorado somewhere that sends out a radio signal transmitting the precise time, and all of these clocks (and watches) receive that signal and perfectly synch themselves with that signal.

It was a little creepy when my father called out that we were going to lunch at 12:30. I looked at my (atomic) watch, looked at the (atomic) clock on the wall, and across the room at the (atomic) clock in the kitchen, and they were all precisely synchronized to the exact time, seconds clicking off in perfect unison. It was creepy, like automatons, no life. My other watches, set four minutes fast, have no place in this world of meticulous, overbearing calibration.

I had set my watch (non-atomic) when I left San Francisco. But traveling across the country, time zone by time zone I had to knock off an hour, and each time, the zero second was a guess, imprecise at best. So it was a bit of a surprise when I got to my parents' house and compared my watch to the atomic time and found it a mere five seconds off. Of course, that was just lucky. A little bit off one way from one time zone, compensated the other way crossing another time zone; still, five seconds is pretty darned close. Five seconds?!! That won't do! Time to melt down that watch, strip it for it's springs and sprockets!

I don't know what it is about my father and clocks. Right now where I'm sitting at the kitchen table, three different clocks are within earshot, three others are in visual range, not counting VCRs, and I know there is one other one out of sight just around the corner.

It's not a mortality thing. Sure they're getting on in age, and sure they are shameless capitalist/materialists, buying shit like they have no concept of "you can't take it with you", but they talk rationally and sensibly about their own deaths. They aren't in denial about their age and their place in the life cycle.

I wonder if the fellow who discovered or conceived of the light-year realized the irony in measuring that length of distance using a term relating to time. If the theory is true that time stops at the speed of light, a particle of light travels a year, covering the distance of a light-year, but is the same "age" at the end as it was at the beginning.