One evening not long ago I discovered that my phone can take time-lapse movies. Now, I’m sure everyone with the ubiquitous phone that we all apparently can’t live without has known about this feature for a long time. But I don’t take a lot of photographs, so it was new to me. I happened to be out watching the sun go down over the water at the time, so I propped the phone on a nearby stone and set it to record the final moments of a hot summer day and the arrival of night.
It was such a great idea until it was a dumb idea. I had made the effort to get to an advantageous place where people appreciate the show but don’t feel the need to applaud the performance, and for twenty-five perfectly good minutes (minutes that I had set aside to watch what promised to be a glorious sunset) I fretted that maybe the sunset wouldn’t really be as good as it could be. Who knew that there is so much that can conceivably go wrong with a sunset? The cloud bank at the horizon could be too thick, obscuring the sun and preventing that afterglow in the upper clouds that happens after the big orb drops below the horizon. The upper clouds could blow away before old Apollo got his chariot down, leaving nothing for the pink and purple light to hit as it headed up into space and away. The phone could run out of batteries!
And when I wasn’t worried, I was wishing the thing would get on with it and be done so I could watch the result on the little three-inch screen.
It’s lame, I know. I basically missed the whole thing. But worse than that, the resulting movie was alarming. It showed that the sunset had indeed been spectacular, and that after dark the lighted boats that go one way up Vineyard Sound often turn around and go back to where they came from. It was beautiful and cool, but seemed less like a keepsake to remind me of a late-summer evening well spent than an unwelcome reminder that time is passing far faster than anyone wants to think.
There’s a happy thought for the coming autumn, alright.
A time-lapse paragraph of the summer just passed might go something like this: lighthouse moves, high-school girls’ tennis wins state championship, some house sells for almost $25 million, the Menemsha dragger Unicorn calls it quits, tribe talks bingo, rumors of royals come and go, president comes and goes, candidates come and go, corn comes and goes, a typo in my last editor’s letter comes and goes, house guests come and go, did I mention a typo in my last editor’s letter came and went?
Man, I hate typos. It was my fault for messing with the column one last time after all the better spellers and punctuators already had signed off. And it almost ruined my day when I found it, too late to do anything about it.
But it turns out that sunset movie is good for one thing: I look at that sun, sinking like a ship, and I think, just let my typo go...
