A Sense of Timing

A quirk of mine is to be able to guess the time of day or night without a watch, often to within five minutes.

This ‘talent’ extends to correctly predicting time of arrival at a destination without the aid of a GPS, either on land or on the water.

I am often wrong, of course, but sometimes surprisingly accurate.  And this led, on one occasion, to infuriating my elderly father-in-law.

He had made a wrong turn as we were driving together from Ontario to the East Coast, and was not in a particularly good frame of mind, especially when I went out on a limb and said, “Don’t worry, Gamp, we will be in sight of the Quebec bridge at 12:12 pm.”

Half an hour later, we sighted the bridge, and darned if the time on the dash wasn't 12:12.

Gamp knew bullshit when he heard it, and was mightily irked that in this case I had guessed the time of arrival exactly.  He never forgot it.

In later years, he tried valiantly to show me that he could best me at estimating time, but never quite pulled it off.

When he was in his early 90s, he came to live with us after his bride of 66 years passed away.  We remodelled the dining room and living room in our old house to make a suite for him and he moved in the spring to become an integral part of the family.

He sincerely appreciated our efforts to accommodate him, and told me on more than one occasion that I shouldn't worry, at his age he figured he just had a couple of years left anyway, and then our household would be back to normal.

Two years later, almost to the day of his arrival, he passed away peacefully.

It’s going to be hard to ‘top’ that one!