My father, who was a taciturn man, didn’t have much to say while he was alive. He has been a resident of the Oakhill Cemetery in Kirkwood, Missouri for 52 years and, one way or another, in recent essays he has turned up a good bit more than he did when he was alive.
In the instant case, the cause for him reappearing has to do with the miserable arms of daylight savings time, which was imposed upon the American public again this week. As you can surmise, I am not a fan of daylight savings time, and I wish it would go away forever. But the dim bulbs in the American Congress have not only decreed that we should have daylight savings time for more than six months of each year but that it should be extended. My father had the right idea. He would contend, as I contend, that daylight savings time means that it ain’t natural.
The old man had several other examples that he considered not in accordance with the natural order of things in this universe. For example, in his view, smoking cigarettes was a peculiar characteristic. He always referred to that as “sucking cigarettes.” According to the old man, the only proper smoke for a man was an occasional cigar. On three or four occasions, I tried cigars and I found them so distasteful that I considered giving up smoking tobacco altogether. But cigars were the smoke of choice of my father’s generation, and cigarettes were simply not natural.
During his lifetime, I am quite certain that he never heard the word “gay” associated with males with effeminate qualities. The word “gay” came along much after he was involved in the American political scene. I am quite certain that during his lifetime, he would not have held any prejudice against gay men. He simply considered such people as not quite real men. While my father was tolerant of men he did not consider full men, he had other qualities that would make him a natural for an essay called “It Ain’t Natural.” For example, in the senior Ezra’s case, he always thought of automobile engines only in terms of the in-line variety. The “in-line variety” means that the cylinders fire from front to back, one after another in a straight line.
In 1932, when Henry Ford introduced his V-8 automobiles, my father denounced them on the grounds that V-8s were not natural. He found that the pistons wear out their rings because they were slanted against the cylinder walls, and would use great amounts of oil. In that respect, what the old man said was absolutely true. But over the years, the science of engines has progressed. It has been my observation that they use less and less oil. But from his point of view, a V-8 engine was not natural.
When it came to time pieces, it was my father’s view that the only proper time pieces were watches that could be held in the hand and worn on watch fobs that could be deposited in that little pocket on men’s clothing that used to be called a watch pocket. When it came to men wearing wrist watches, he denounced them as “ain’t natural.” On the subject of time pieces, my father never changed his views. He considered any man who wore a wrist watch as being less than masculine. In fact, I guess he would consider them sort of gay in today’s terms.
And then there was the time when after a long job search, my former drafting teacher at Clayton High School recommended me for a job with AT&T. At that time, long before computers came into existence, drafting was done on a piece of linen using black India ink. It was an article of faith among draftsmen, which I became for AT&T in my first job, to dislike long foulard ties. My preference, of course, was for bow ties, the reason being that foulard ties that hung outside in the front of a shirt had a propensity for dragging across the newly drawn lines. I tried to explain this to my father. It did little to overcome his prejudice against bow ties. According to the old man, bow ties were worn by people who were less than fully male, and were not natural.
Now to return to daylight savings time. I can understand that there are those in our society who wish to get started early. That is fine with me. But why should they trouble the rest of us with also starting early? If someone wishes to start work at 7 AM instead of 8 AM, I would have no objection. But the fact remains that high noon occurs only once a day and it occurs at noon time, whether the clock says 12 o’clock or 1 o’clock. In accordance with the inheritance of my father’s suspicion, I would have to repeat that such a proposition as daylight savings time “ain’t natural.” And daylight savings time has my undying opposition from start to finish.
E. E. CARR
March 24, 2010
Essay 398
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Kevin’s commentary:
I suppose that I understand much of this essay, but he loses me when he doesn’t take to cigarettes because they are “not natural,” given that they are just tobacco which is a plant, whereas an in-line engine could be “natural” despite the fact that it is made of metal. I suppose I am forced to conclude that he is interpreting the word “natural” in a non-literal sense. So really, when he said something “ain’t natural” he’s was really just saying it was something that differed from his idea of “the norm,” which isn’t as much a denigration as an observation.