Alabamer Time
The concept of time intrigues me. I worked as a long
distance operator for the telephone company for years. Minutes
and seconds were the stuff of my job. Those were the days when
that ‘voice with a smile,’ a live operator, came in on a long
distance call after sixty seconds with, “You’ve talked one
minute.” Accurate timers told us when to do so, but after a
while, we hardly needed them. To this day, I am able to
estimate the passage of time with a good deal of accuracy.
My fascination with time may have been birthed in the fact
that my grandparents kept their clocks set on ‘Alabamer’ time, as
we called Central Standard Time. They lived in rural Haralson
County, Georgia, which was (and is) in the Eastern Standard Time
zone. After Daylight Savings Time was introduced in the late
‘forties, their clocks were right at least half the year, since
they would never ’spring forward’ or ‘fall back.’ Why they chose
to live on Central Standard Time is a mystery, at least to me.
If Daddy knew the reason, he kept it to himself.
Mamaw and Papaw lived their entire lives in the state of
Georgia, never even crossing the line to Alabama, or any other
neighboring state. In his many job changes, Daddy did move his
family to Alabama and back to Georgia three times before I was
ten years old. Possibly my grandparents felt closer to him,
their only son, and us grandchildren, if their time matched ours
and that’s when they started keeping their clocks set slower than
the prevailing hour in Haralson County. Such sentimentality
seems a little out of character for a hard-working couple who
farmed all of their lives, rooted and grounded in Georgia’s rich,
red dirt. But deeply caring parents that they were, it’s
possible.
Or maybe being out of step, time-wise, with their community
was a way of declaring their unity in overcoming the shadow of
illegitimacy they’d both grown up under, a heavy burden in those
days. This bond would probably have been unspoken, and never
shared with others, by such a strong, reclusive couple, but I
can believe it.
In time my grandparents retired from farming and Daddy moved
them to an apartment in town. By then I had married, moved to
Tennessee, and begun my unique operator’s bond with the ticking
clocks of life. I’m sure they continued their custom and died a
few years later, as they had lived, on ‘Alabamer’ time.
©Sylvia Nickels
