Monday, May 28, 2007

You CAN Live Twice

My seventh grade granddaughter, Talli, is returning home from Japan sometime after noon today. She left the Asian Island at three in the afternoon today.

Whaaaat?

She’ll literally get home "before she left". By midnight tonight she’ll have had a 44-hour Monday. I’d call that living twice.

The reason, of course, is that when flying east across the international date line, you gain back the day you “lost” when flying in the other direction.

This raises all kinds of interesting questions: Where did the day go when she lost it 10 days ago? And, how can you make a day stretch to 44 hours? Is time relative? What is actually happening when time is “passing”?

I could probably give semi-plausible answers to those questions if I were pressed. But today is a holiday, and my mind is more on fishing – er, that is, on getting a small pontoon boat so I can fish with my sons and relatives when they dangle lines from a “float tube”.

I won’t be able to really focus on the pontoon boat, however, until I’ve heard for sure that Talli is home safely.

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