In an episode of Easy Aces a classic radio program, Jane Ace proposed a calendar with thirteen months, ending with October... November... December... Remember. "Remember would be the month when you did everything you put off during the first twelve months.”

As with many of Jane’s fancies, her apparent zaniness had a hidden wisdom. Most of us look back on the past year with a twinge of regret for broken resolutions, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled promises. Suppose that, between Christmas and New Year’s, we had a month dedicated to tidying up our desks and our lives.   

During the month of Remember, shopping would be kept to a minimum, while businesses would concentrate on inventories and renovations. Housecleaning would focus on neglected repairs and the disposal of unnecessary items. Checkbooks would be balanced, bills would be paid, and correspondence would be answered or jettisoned. We would write or call neglected friends and reactivate old friendships. We would finish books we had put off reading, or decide we needn’t bother. On a deeper level, we would sit quietly and think about our lives, reconsider our priorities, and decide what we really want or need and what we can do without. We would meditate or, better yet, pray.

At the end of Remember, we would greet the New Year with neater homes and lighter hearts, unburdened by excess spiritual or material baggage.

The calendar would be easy to readjust -- thirteen 28-day months, approximating most definitions of a lunar month, and an extra New Year’s Day (two for leap years). During any given year, each month would begin on the same day of the week, making dates easier to recall.

But of course, this is an impossible dream. The month of Remember would be bad for business, and therefore unthinkable. And almost all the world’s calendars are twelve-month cycles, with or without occasional corrective insertions. The Koran even prohibits thirteen months in a year.

Therefore, if the ideal of a corrective and reflective month of Remember appeals to you, you must create it for yourself. And that can be done, if you have the heart and will to do it. One key to the door into Remember lies literally within your grasp.

To prove it, take a walk in your neighborhood about 8 pm tonight. As you walk past your neighbors’ houses, you will note that almost every living room window emits an eerie multicolored rapidly changing light. If the curtains are drawn, you will see groups of people, motionless as statues, with faces blank as if hypnotized, staring at moving shadows on their walls. These are the bizarre modern embodiment of the prisoners in Plato's cave.

In what was intended as an allegory of philosophy or education, Plato quotes Socrates as describing

a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to designate names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality...

Never in his wildest dreams could Plato have imagined that people would actually submit to being so chained and voluntarily watching shadows on a wall. And yet look here upon this picture, and on this:

According to a recent report, the average American watches television almost five hours a day. How many hours do you watch, dear reader, and how much of it do you really enjoy? Or do you watch merely out of habit, or to avoid the exertion of conversation, or just to kill time?

As I said, a key to the door into Remember is within your grasp. It’s called the remote control and the on-off button is probably at the upper right. If you use it to cut off two hours of television per day, you will gain an extra thirty days each year. You can use some of it for much-needed extra sleep. And the rest will be your own personal month of Remember.

If you’re not a TV watcher, there are other doors. For example, the fact that you are reading this article suggests that you like to surf the Internet. Perhaps you re overdoing it and should cut back. Or perhaps you’re addicted to video games or chat rooms, as a matter of habit rather than genuine pleasure. Examine your pastimes carefully; remember that you are trying to conserve one of the most precious gifts you will ever get -- time.

What will you do with your own personal month of Remember? Perhaps you’ll follow Jane Ace’s recommendations, or mine. But the best answer probably came from motion-study pioneer Frank Gilbreth, as quoted in Cheaper by the Dozen:

Someone once asked Dad: “But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?” “For work, if you love that best,” said Dad. “For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure.” He looked over the top of his pince-nez. “For mumblety-peg, if that’s where your heart lies.”