I went to the doctor recently for the follow up to my physical.
He took me into a little exam room to speak privately.
“Well, Thom, I have bad news, and worse news.”
That didn’t sound good, so I asked, “What’s the bad news, Doc?”
“I hate to tell you, but you’ve only got about two weeks to live.”
Taken aback, I shakily asked “Then what’s the worse news?”
“I should have told you two weeks ago, but I was on vacation.”
Whenever possible, I like to start with a little humor. Especially at the expense of doctors.
I tried reading an article from long ago written by Albert Einstein explaining the concept of time. Three and a half pages into it, I just threw myself on the floor writhing like a three year old (or an 81 year old) with a poopy diaper. It had melted my brain.
No person who barely passed high school algebra with a D-minus should attempt that. Me… in other words.
Time is impossible to measure properly or understand. If you are a 102-year-old billionaire, there’s not enough. If you’re a 21-year-old serving a life sentence in prison, there’s way too much.
Every one of us has experienced sitting at a desk in school, watching those clunky old white clocks on the wall. Pleading with the Almighty for the hands line up to read 4:00.
Click… long hand moves one notch. Pause. Repeat… repeat… repeat.
I think they bought those clumsy cheapo clocks on purpose. Just to torture.
Side note: One of the few advantages of being a 20-year-old GenZ is that you can’t read a manual clock that has hands. Instead of making them learn to do that, we just provide them with digital timepieces. That way they won’t be late to pick up their 23rd place “participation trophies” on their way to Starbucks.
The word itself is a shape shifting moving target. It means too many things.
You can TIME yourself reading this article. It’s about TIME? TIME will tell?
TIME heals all? What TIME do you have? TIME out? TIME is money? TIMES up?
And on and on.
When that showoff Einstein connected time with mathematics, he REALLY messed ME over.
Trying to tie time and math together never really worked for me.
I’ve noted this story before, but it illustrates a point that fits my life, and as I’ve said before… the statute of limitations should be up by now.
When I was 18 years old I had to take the SAT to get into Mississippi State.
It was a scary thing. The test was timed and part of it was… MATH!
The rest of the subjects were no problem, but the math part had all kinds of stuff like geometry, trigonometry and data analysis. Had to look them up in the dictionary to even know what these strange words meant.
Luckily my friend and band member Eddie Jaynes would be sitting next to me and he was good at math. Really good. So I just looked out of the corner of my eye and copied his dot pattern.
It worked, but my score made them think I was a math genius. I had to fight to keep them from putting me in classes at the level of “Mathematics for Nuclear Engineering.”
I remember being a young guy making car payments, often on the first of every month. The trick was accumulating the right amount of money from January 1st to February 1st so the tow truck doesn’t come looking for you.
Without fail, the first would come around again and my reaction would be
“No! That can’t be right! Seems like I just paid that last week! (pause) Uh… guess I didn’t.” It’s been a whole month?
“Tempus fugit.” (Latin for “time flies”)
“Les mathematiqes such.” (French for “math “sucks”)
Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.
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