Time, having insisted on conformity all day, now sits back and relaxes, and watches indulgently as boys wend homeward at all sorts of paces. It is left only for the individual Mam to complain at a straggler. The boys become people again. People to be cared for and loved for themselves. People who have personal hopes and dreams. People who wear clothes that add to their sense of identity. People who can choose what to read and what to play.
These are the people that Time sees finally drifting off to bed. They think little of the next day and the life it will bring. But Time can see it already. Time sees their yesterdays and their tomorrows, their ancestors and their descendants.
Perhaps, as it smiles gently to itself embodied in the face of the slow moon, Time can also see beyond the close horizon of each present life and well into its next. And perhaps with that great vista to add to the minutiae to which it has attended in each moment of this day, it can see, as we can not, the meaning and purpose in it all. It, only, can see the true place of Aberdare Boys’ Grammar School in the great game of life; how its thread is woven into the tapestry of life; how the voices of its boys play their part in the great choral music of the universe.
JDM, October 2006
