Which Are the Magic Moments?
on summer, history's shadow, and specks of light in Tim Dlugos's "Ordinary Time"
When you’re young the summer is imbued with an uneasy, unreal importance: anything could happen. Away from the rigid context of the school year, those few months—filled however they are—are preciously apart from everything you know. Whatever books you read or brief friends you make or fireflies whose light you cradle in your palm might reshape or undo you, delivering someone new to August by the time the school calendar starts again. From here, it sounds exhilarating. But when you’re young, it feels long and often mundane—the doldrums of ordinary time.
Any summer in our lives contains, between dog-eared dramas or celebrations, these yawning bouts of ordinary time. Dog days and hot, sleepless nights; picking at mosquito bites. But I read a chilling sentence yesterday wondering if this might be “our last summer in a democracy” and considered how I might remember it: talking about therapy over tacos with friends; dancing over Pride; adding chopped pecans to a bowl of apricot slices. How could it ever feel like enough?
Eileen Chang, in the sharp essay “From the Ashes” describing her time at university during the Battle of Hong Kong, recalls: “…when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory flew into a panic, ‘What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!’”1
Significance sneaks up on you. We watch history forming like a hurricane, darting around the parameters of its path, bracing for its winds to strengthen or praying that its intensity weakens by the time it passes over us. But of course we do not know which gutters it will flood, whose houses will be spared, or what cleanup it will require until after the storm has passed. You recognize what had been there—a gnarled branch, a season of friendship—once it is gone.
In Tim Dlugos’s poem “Ordinary Time,” the poet—battling HIV during the plague era of the epidemic, desperately aware of his own impending end—begins in wonder, asking, “which are the magic / moments in ordinary / time?” Immediately, he answers: all of them. As the poem unspools down the page, so too does a dizzying index of precious friendships and loving specificity: David, Leonard, Eileen; a scrap of fabric and blueberry peach pie. In the eye of history’s cruel storm, every detail, every bite becomes magical and necessary.
Ordinary Time
by Tim Dlugos
Which are the magic moments in ordinary time? All of them, for those who can see. That is what redemption means, I decide at the meeting. Then walk with David wearing his new Yale T-shirt and new long hair to 103. Leonard and Eileen come, too. Leonard wears a shark’s tooth on a chain around his neck and long blond hair. These days he’s the manager of Boots and Saddles (“Bras and Girdles,” my beloved Bobby used to say) and costumer for the Gay Cable Network’s Dating Game. One week the announcer is a rhinestone cowboy, sequin shirt and black fur chaps, the next a leatherman, etc. Eileen’s crewcut makes her face light up. Underneath our hairstyles, 23 years of sobriety, all told— the age of a girl who’s “not so young but not so very old,” wrote Berryman, who flew from his recovery with the force of a poet hitting bottom. It’s not the way I choose to go out of this restaurant or day today, and I have a choice. Wanda the comedian comes over to our table. “Call me wicked Wanda,” she smirks when we’re introduced. Why is New York City awash in stand-up comics at the least funny point in its history? Still, some things stay the same. People wonder what the people in their buildings would think if the ones who were wondering became incredibly famous, as famous as Madonna. Debby Harry lived in Eileen’s building in the Village in the early seventies, and she was just the shy girl in the band upstairs. Poets read the writing of their friends, and are happy when they like it thoroughly, when the work’s that good and the crippling sense of competition stays away. Trips get planned: David home to California, Eileen to New Mexico, Chris and I to France and Spain, on vectors which will spread out from a single point, like ribs of an umbrella. Then after the comfort of a wedge of blueberry peach pie and cup of Decaf, sober friends thread separate ways home through the maze of blankets on the sidewalk covered with the scraps of someone else’s life. Mine consists of understanding that the magic isn’t something that I make, but something that shines through the things I make and do and say the way a brooch or scrap of fabric shines from the detritus to catch Leonard’s eye and be of use for costumes, when I am fearless and thorough enough to give it room, all the room there is in ordinary time, which embraces all the people and events and hopes that choke the street tonight and still leaves room for everyone and everything and every other place, the undescribed and indescribable, more various and cacophonous than voice can tell or mind conceive, and for the sky’s vast depths from which they’re all a speck of light.
Tim Dlugos, "Ordinary Time" from A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos. Copyright © 2011 by Tim Dlugos. Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books2.
We don’t yet know what the fall will bring. We don’t know if these times will be the significant, shifting ones upon which we look back and wistfully smile. But what if they are? It is imperative, then, that we pay close attention, finding within this ordinary time all the specks of light worth saving.
Eileen Chang, Written on Water, New York Review of Books. 2023.