Like a Fish in Water...: Forever or a Day by Sarah Jacoby

It can be precise, like pouring the first cup of tea or picking out the first shoe.

It's a drum beat. Ba dum Ba dum Ba dum Ba dum.

It can come and go and you never notice it's there. Where did it go?

We can't see it or hold it, but we know when it comes and goes. We're stuck in it, but never in the same place in it.

It can hang heavy on our hands, but it sometimes slips away.

Yes, it's TIME, in Sarah Jacoby's new book, Forever or a Day (Chronicle Books, 2018), which teases the reader a bit about its subject, but slyly shows its hand on the frontispiece, which shows a newspaper delivery van whose side reads TIMES. In a child's-eye-view of times passing, we see a bus stop with time-pressed passengers checking their watches, an airline time table with flights ON TIME or LATE, and we see good times on vacation where the kids long to go back in time for a do-over.

"Can we stay longer?"

It's a question to which there is only one honest answer.

We've only got what we've got.

There are good times and bad times, but the best times are those shared with those we love best.

Artist Jacoby shows close-ups of intimate times or lovely panoramas of sea, sky, and land done in a wash of watercolored images, some clear, some slightly out of focus like time remembered. This is beautiful and thoughtful book that introduces to young children the concept of time as something that both can and can't be measured by a clock, something of which we are usually no more aware than the fish is aware he is in water. Even Einstein found it a good thing to think about, and when you have the time, this is a good book to share.