A Place Where Clocks Don't Work

Sitting in the train station in Ben Guerir I kept checking the clock, trying to patiently wait for the train to Rabat which was the start of my long trip home to America for my brother's funeral. I don't know why I kept checking the clock, they never work anyway. The big clocks decorating the train stations, the small clocks in the train stations, the clocks outside the banks, the clocks in busses, and even the clocks in Moroccan homes either don't work or the time is incorrect, and this clock was no different. Come to think of it, the clock hanging in my apartment doesn't even work, and I have never bothered to fix it.  The hands have been set at 3:30 since the time I moved in, never changing. If only life was that easy.  

I find it pleasant that most of the clocks in Morocco I have encountered don't work. Time of day and when you do something often revolves around the call to prayer which happens five times a day. It's 4am, I don't have to wake up, but now I have the call to prayer to help me get back to sleep. Oh, it must be around 12:30, better get home for lunch...and so on.  The time of the call to prayer is based on the lunar calendar, and as the days get longer or shorter I often change my class schedule to fit after the 4/5ish call to prayer. I don't even have to tell my students about it, since they don't seem to show up until after that call to prayer anyway. Time seems fluid in Morocco and something that you don't take too seriously. Since "if Gd wills"(inshallah) is the unofficial slogan of Morocco, you arrive precisely the time you were intended to arrive. 

In Morocco, no one seems to be in a rush to do anythng (except maybe board a train). It is like Moroccans have all the time in the world. This has often given me the false impression that time will move just as slow back in America. But whenever my Moroccan mother scolds me about how my American mother only stayed in Morocco for a week, she should have stayed here for at least a month, I jokingly say that in America there is no time. And if you really think about it, it is kind of true. As I live my life in Morocco at this slow relaxing pace, life in America continues to move at lightning speed.  Five weddings, countless birthdays, career changes, and the last years of my brother's life have all passed without me. I often hope that when I step off the plane in America, everything I missed was just a dream, and that it all didn't really happen without me. But it did, and that was the choice I made, and the one I will have to live with.

Perhaps I will try and bring this concept of time back to America and see how it works...hopefully it doesn't get me fired. But while owning non-functioning clocks and getting somewhere when I get there won't bring my brother back, I now have a new appreciation for my favorite J.R.R. Tolkien quote:

"Darkness took me. And I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead and everyday was as long as a life-age of the earth. But it was not the end."

And it brings me peace.