TIME REVISITED

Time Revisited

 By Dr. Jeri Fink

It’s time. Again.

J.B. Priestly, the novelist who ran out of time 29 years ago, said it best: 

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

A year ago I posted a blog, About Time. Since we just left Daylight Saving Time and “gained” an hour to use or misuse, I thought it would be an ideal time to revisit. We “give” the hour back on March 9, but who’s counting? Certainly not Arizona or Hawaii who refuse to indulge in any time control.

That’s left to The Masters of Time in Washington D.C. In 2007, Congress extended Daylight Saving for 4-5 weeks. This was a follow-up to the original Uniform Time Act passed in 1966 to reinforce the law supporting the Standard Time Act of 1918.

It’s amazing that both sides of the aisle were able to agree on time. Today, The Masters of Time wait for the very last minute to accomplish simple tasks like keeping the government running and paying bills.

My grandson Johnny has a better understanding of time than all our representatives in Washington. I was in California and decided to FaceTime him at home in New York. It was sunny in LA (isn’t it always sunny in LA?) and nighttime in New York. Have you ever tried to explain the concept of time zones to a 6-year old? After all my science talk, Johnny came up with the only logical conclusion.

“Time is broken.” 

 







I think he's right.

We have digital time, analog time, atomic time, and military time. There’s no time, anytime, every time, and time out. Why are there so many ways to describe time? Malcolm Forbes, the multimillionaire who ran out of time 23 years ago, summed it up:

There is never enough time unless you’re serving it.

                                                                        Good point. Where is time if we haven’t been behind bars?

Is it where my husband and I stand in Greenwich, England on the Prime Meridian, one foot west, the other east, at Zero Degrees longitude?  GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) was established at the Prime Meridian in 1851 and remains the global standard. Midnight is Zero Hours GMT. 

Can it be found on www.time.gov  where two government agencies, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) work to maintain time that never differs from Coordinated Universal Time by more than 0.0000001 seconds?

Let’s look at some alternatives. Consider time travel or time lapse – which everyone expects from geezers anyway. Head over to Times Square or spend an afternoon reading The New York Times. Check out Time Magazine’s person of the year, including such dignitaries as Joseph Stalin (1942) and You (2006).

There’s only one conclusion in this data swamp, generously offered by the author who gave us the timeless Harry Potter, Muggles, and Dementors.

“Time,” JK Rowling said, “is making fools of us again.”

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Dr. Jeri Fink is a proud geezer and the author of hundreds of articles and twenty-five published books, including Trees Cry For Rain, a gripping historical novel where the past crashes ruthlessly into the present. It can be purchased at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

Her new series, Broken, introduces an innovative Baby Boomer genre that consists of six separate novels following related characters and events through time. It begins in the present and ends in the fifteenth century. Each thriller, set in a different time period, relates heart-stopping stories from love affairs to psychopaths. The Broken series will be available in 2014.

Visit Jeri at her website www.drjerifink.com or email her at drjeri@drjerifink.com