etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

today i took a trip to dickson brothers’ hardware store in harvard square. before today, i don’t think i ever really acknowledged that it existed. like all other things though, my acknowledgment didn’t really matter, it existed just fine on its own finely tucked, or more plopped, between the many book stores and coffee shops of harvard square.

my shopping there was not per chance, less of a stumble and more of a step. i went to dickson brothers to purchase what i now know to be called a “minute minder” and what i always thought of as a wind up kitchen timer thing with a flat circular shape dial. the timer has on its face sixty minutes. one can wind it to any time between zero and sixty minutes. the timer then clicks, or rather unwinds, to the end of that time period (defined by the corresponding number at the point where one winded it up) and then whimpers out a slight ring.

it’s pretty, with a metallic silver finish.

in class, my professor introduced us to “the moods” by william butler yeats. the poem, or song if you may, compares time and emotion. time, it shares or rather we share with ourselves when we recite the lines, “drops in decay,/Like a candle burnt out,” whereas “fire-born moods,” fire-born (professor vendler tells us) because in the ancient tradition of the four elements (wind, water, earth and fire) fire was the one that was the element of the gods, the one that never died, lasted forever.

perhaps, yeats wrote that poem after he found a long searched for kitchen accessory.