Thom Caraccio: Time…it’s all about the math

I recently went to the doctor to have my checkup done.

He led me into a small 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 break it to you, but you only have about two weeks left to live.”

Taken aback, I asked, trembling, “Then what’s the worst news?”

“I should have told you two weeks ago, but I was on vacation.”

Whenever possible, I like to start with a bit of humor. Especially at the expense of the doctors.

I tried to read an article by Albert Einstein who explained the concept of time a long time ago. After three and a half pages, I just threw myself on the floor and writhed like a three-year-old (or an 81-year-old) in a poopy diaper. It had melted my brain.

No one who barely passed algebra school with a B-minus should attempt this. I… in other words.

It is impossible to measure or understand time correctly. If you’re a 102-year-old billionaire, that’s not enough. When you’re a 21-year-old serving a life sentence, there’s way too much.

All of us have experienced sitting at a desk in school and watching the clunky old white clocks on the wall. Ask the Almighty to place hands in a row to read 4:00.

Click… The long hand moves one step. Pause. Repeat…repeat…repeat.

I think they bought these clumsy, cheap watches on purpose. Just to torture.

Side note: One of the few advantages of a 20 year old GenZ is that you can’t read a manual watch with hands. Instead of teaching them this, we simply provide them with digital timepieces. This way they won’t be late to pick up their 23rd place “participation trophies” on the way to Starbucks.

The word itself is a shape-shifting, moving target. It means too many things.

You can take the time to read this article. Is it about TIME? TIME will tell?

TIME heals everything? What time do you have? Time out? TIME is money? TIMES expired?

And so on and on.

When that Einstein poser connected time with math, he REALLY confused ME.

Trying to connect time and math never really worked for me.

I’ve noted this story before, but it illustrates a point that applies to my life, and as I’ve said before… the statute of limitations should have run out by now.

When I was 18, 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 included everything like geometry, trigonometry and data analysis. I had to look them up in the dictionary to even know what these strange words meant.

Luckily my friend and band member Eddie Jaynes was 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 stop them from putting me in Nuclear Mathematics level courses.

I remember as a young man often making car payments on the first of every month. The trick was to accumulate the right amount of money from January 1st to February 1st so that the tow truck wouldn’t come looking for you.

Without a doubt the first one would come back and my reaction would be

“NO! That can’t be right! Seems like I just paid that last week! (pause) Uh… I guess I didn’t.” It’s been a whole month?

“Tempus fugit.” (Latin for “time passes”)

“Les mathematiqes such.” (French for “Math sucks”)

Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired film actor living in West Palm Beach, Florida and a Columbus native. He graduated from SD Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his true hometown.