Sports - Outdoors: What Time Is It?

I turned to acknowledge him and said without thinking, “Okay, see you later” and finished getting ready to step out into the ten degree cold.

I was all settled in my spot snuggled up next to the stump of a fallen tree with my hot seat up under my butt, got my pack where I could reach all the “must have” items including snacks and water, got my rifle loaded, checked to be sure the safety was on and leaned back to wait for the big one!

And I waited… and I waited… and waited… The sun came up and found its way through the leafless tree tops to touch my face with its warm caress and I waited…and waited. The only two things I could think of was how cold it was and the card my wife made for me the week before when she took a picture of a big deer in our back yard and presented it to me when I got home from yet another weekend without harvesting a buck.

After a while, I got to thinking about breakfast and about “see you between 9:30 and 10” and wondered what time it was getting to be. You see, I have a problem. A couple of years ago I had surgery and doctors removed a blood vessel from my left arm. In the process, they nicked a nerve near my wrist that, when I touch the area, feels as if I whacked the funny bone in my elbow. So, I can no longer wear a wrist watch on my left arm. I know, you’re asking why don’t I wear one on my right arm? I don’t for a couple of reasons. One is that somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember my mother telling me that you never did that…it was against some ancient Italian law dating back to the very first wrist watch ever stolen by the mafia. And besides, on my right wrist, I have to wear the copper and medical I.D. alert bracelets to ward off evil spirits and notify the EMT’s that might find me dead in the woods that I don’t know what time the spirits got me.

The truth is that I carry a cheap pocket watch. My real problem is that I can’t ever seem to find two time pieces that give me the same time. Do you have that problem? I set my pocket watch with the time on my VCR. You would think that the VCR would be correct because it’s electronic. But it’s always a minute or two different than the time on The Weather Channel. You know, Weather on the 8’s except it’s never on the 8’s.

Before I leave the house, I also check my pocket watch against the clock on our stove only to find it a minute or two different. Then I check it against the clock in my Jeep which is different than the time I’m being told by the loud mouth guy on the radio. All different!

When I’m sitting in the woods, I can check the time on my GPS or I can tune in to the NOAA weather channels on my little hand-held two-way radio. Inevitably different every time. Or I can use the ultimate source, that being each and every clock that my wife has ever set the time on. In her wisdom, she sets her clocks seven minutes fast. Seven… not eight and not six, but seven.

Every clock she uses… in her car… her bedside alarm… on her wrist…doesn’t matter, it has to be seven minutes ahead of the real time. I have tried a number of times to get her to explain her logic, and what scares me is she actually has logic behind it, but I can’t seem to get it. But then… she is a blond!

When I wore a watch and someone would ask me what time it was, I would hold up my left arm as if shading my eyes from the sun while really looking at the watch on my left wrist and tell them the time as if I was reading the position of the sun in the sky. I would inevitably get a “how do you do that?” to which I would just say “ahhh shucks, it’s nothing” and spit into the wind.

See you outdoors!

You can reach Dick at rtotino@nycap.rr.com.