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Story originally printed in the Winona Daily News or online at www.winonadailynews.com

Published - Thursday, April 17, 2008

Joellen Barak: Time can be so precise, yet so very indistinct

By Joellen Barak | Community columnist

It takes the Earth 365.245 days to circle the sun. Every four years, we have to add a day to clean up all of those extra .245s. Every fourth century, though, we don’t add the extra day, to compensate for the difference between .245 days and an even .25. The sun’s light takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach the Earth. Eight minutes, 20 seconds, after traveling 93 million miles. (I don’t know if there are celestial rest stops involved.)

The two top finishers in the 2007 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth were 1 minute 34 seconds apart, after running for more than two hours.

In 1992, Al Unser Jr. beat Scott Goodyear in the Indy 500 by .043 seconds, the closest finish ever. They raced for 500 miles and finished less than a half-second apart.

Any time of the night or day, you can get the time from no less than the U.S. Naval Observatory’s master clock simply by calling a local phone number.

It amazes me that we can be so precise about time, especially when you consider that we started out with simply observing the stars, the planets and the sun.

As I write this, my parents are celebrating their 43rd wedding anniversary. There is no traditional gift for a 43rd anniversary — it gets too weird if you go with rubies for the 40th plus leather for the third — but 43 years is pretty impressive. But even though we can measure time to the hundredths of a second, 43 years is kind of ambiguous. Most of our day-to-day time is.

Sometimes, the way my dad looks at my mom, you’d swear they were newlyweds. He is so head-over-heels for her — and vice versa. Other times, you can tell they’ve been married nearly forever — those situations where “for better or worse” really shows. They can finish each other’s sentences, and do so routinely. But sometimes Dad’s hovering drives Mom nuts, and I know Dad’s tongue sometimes ends up with tooth marks when Mom exhibits her trademark stubborn streak. (She claims she’s not stubborn, just opinionated.)

Now, my husband and I haven’t even been married a year yet, and I know that sometimes it seems a whole lot longer. (Just kidding, honey! Right?)

I don’t know how something that can be measured so concretely can also be so incredibly elastic. My daughter turned 17 last week, even though she was born only last month. You see, it can’t possibly be 17 years since her birth, although middle school lasted approximately seven decades. I’m certainly not old enough to be the mother of a 17-year-old, although in terms of life experience, I was only about 10 when I had her. And her life has aged me at least 40 years. (Just kidding, other honey! Right?)

It isn’t only the big moments in time that get fuzzy, though. Take the concept of a half-hour, for example. It should be 30 minutes, right? I’ve often noticed that a half-hour lunch break only takes about 20 percent of the time that the last half-hour before quitting time does. If I oversleep and only have a half-hour to get ready for the day, that half-hour takes approximately 39 seconds. A half-hour TV show lasts 22 minutes — if you don’t count the commercials. A half-hour drive with a cranky toddler lasts about 14 hours, while a half-hour flight to the Twin Cities doesn’t even get you beverage service. Half an hour brings a pizza to your door — unless you’re really, really hungry. Then it takes three days. Or unless you can’t find the checkbook — then the pizza takes 4 minutes, 23 seconds.

Scientists have put a lot of effort into measuring time as precisely as humanly possible. Everything from the solar system to racing officials have put those advances to good use.

Precision timing works well for marathons, physics experiments, race results and even getting to work on time. But human timing is infinitely more elastic and, I think, more interesting.

My parents have spent 43 years together — sometimes in the space of two weeks, sometimes in 100 years or so. My husband and I will celebrate our first and 80th anniversary in May. My 3-day-old baby is 17 and 53. A half-hour can be any amount of time you would like it to be.

Al Unser probably thinks that less than half a second is pretty important. The rest of us can simply let it go.

Joellen Barak is an almost lifelong Winona resident and still isn’t sure how that happened. She lives with her husband, her teenage daughter, two neurotic cats and the two dumbest dogs in the known universe.