Friday, November 5, 2021

Andy Young: A chance for some second chances?

By Andy Young

Special to The Windham Eagle 

The clocks get set back this coming weekend, ending Daylight Saving Time for 2021.

Getting an extra hour of sleep will be nice. But there’s something else I’d like to try doing with this Sunday’s bonus 60 minutes.

This impending time change could, if an experiment I’m trying works out, revolutionize life on our planet.

My motivation? Well, like virtually everyone I know, I’ve done some things in my lifetime I’d like to alter.

But what would I undo, assuming I had the power to change history?

Well, I made the last out of a 7-5 loss in the final game of my last Little League baseball season, fouling out to the first baseman with two out and two runners in scoring position. Had I gotten a game-tying (or game-winning) hit, the Easton Hawks would have forced a playoff for the second half championship against the Easton Bears, and had we won that game we would have earned the right to play the Bears again for the championship.

Okay. Maybe that wasn’t a life ruiner. But looking back, I passed on a couple of job opportunities in the broadcast industry I most likely shouldn’t have. I probably whiffed on a potentially life-altering relationship or two, like when I told my then-girlfriend who was returning after a year in Central America that I couldn’t pick her up at the airport when her flight landed because I had a softball game to play. Conversely, I was briefly involved in a couple of short-term liaisons that in retrospect I (and the other party) would have been better off skipping.

I shouldn’t have driven that borrowed moped down a flight of stairs, and even though there weren’t cell phones back then to record my stupidity for posterity, that’s an incident I’d like to erase. I’d love to change the course of events on that day in Montana when some knucklehead barreled through a stop sign, nearly totaling my car (and me) in the process. Had I just left home five minutes earlier (or later) I’d have avoided that fiasco. And I’d have avoided considerable fiscal damage a decade or so ago if I could undo my decision to, after looking both ways and seeing nothing, go through a traffic light in South Portland at 5 a.m. one weekday morning. Who knew a police car manned by an officer with some $230 tickets he was itching to distribute was hiding in a nearby parking lot?

The point of all this rueful reminiscing: I think I’ve stumbled on a way to erase past mistakes, and I’m going to test my theory this coming Sunday morning. The plan: I’ll spill some water on my kitchen floor at 1:30 a.m. (EDT). Then when I wipe it up at 1:29 a.m. (EST), it’ll mean the water was never spilled in the first place. I’ll have successfully erased time!

There are a few minor details I haven’t worked out yet, the primary one being how to negotiate my way through (or around) the space-time continuum. But if my unorthodox theory proves correct and the kitchen floor remains dry when 1:45 a.m. EST rolls around, then I’ll have solved the mystery of the until-now elusive fourth dimension. And if that’s the case, well, it won’t be long before I’m interviewing with ESPN, driving to the airport to meet that incoming flight from Guatemala, and slamming a game-winning home run in a vital Little League game.

And if by some chance the problem of manipulating time proves insurmountable?

Then I suppose I’ll just take the extra hour of sleep. <

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