"Time Will Fool You" by Kenneth Chamlee

 – My son and I straddled the Prime Meridian.

Before I knew it, nearly 20 years passed.

Kenneth Chamlee’s work has appeared in five previous Personal Story Publishing Project anthologies. His latest collections are If Not These Things (Kelsay Books, 2022) and The Best Material for the Artist in the World, a poetic biography of 19th-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023). Ken lives in Mills River, North Carolina, and is an active member of the North Carolina Poetry Society and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com.

Author’s Talk

Kenneth Chamlee

I struggled choosing an incident that would embrace the Sooner or Later theme. My thoughts raced to song titles immediately—the phrase itself is a song by The Grass Roots. There are songs by Pink Floyd and The Allan Parsons Project simply called “Time,” and then there are all the ones with time in their name, like “Time Is on My Side,” “Too Much Time on My Hands,” and “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” A Google search found lists of 100 and 200 pop songs with time in the title. One of my favorites is “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers, with its tick-tock cowbell beginning and the slowdown in the middle before it bass-pounds back into the main drive.

I guess it was inevitable that I started thinking about timepieces and measurement, and that led me to  the atomic clock in Greenwich. Clocks are everywhere in our lives. Besides on the wall or the alarms by the bed, there are clocks in the microwave, coffeemaker, stove, thermostat, phone and TV.  I tallied over 30 devices in our house that indicate time either by a show of hands or by a flashing blue, red or green light. Time to replay The Final Countdown!—Ken Chamlee