So, I'm going to blame my wife. It won't be accurate or even fair, but, what the heck? What good is having a column if you can't use it to shamelessly flog your version of the truth, knowing that, thanks to the magic of the printed word, it's about to become a matter of public record?
In fact, if questioned, I can even puff up and declare that one of the greatest documents ever produced by man, the Constitution of the United States, protects my freedom to recall events and record them as I, a working journalist, see fit.
OK, so I'm only a part-time journalist. Which, I guess, means I get to recall events only part of the time. Sounds about right, anyway.
It's all right there in the First Amendment, I can say, loudly over "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which I keep queued up on my IPod for just such an emergency.
Of course, at this point the Lovely Mrs. Smith usually falls back on her own Constitutional training to cite the infamous "You're an Idiot" clause of the "Did I Mention You're an Idiot?" amendment. OK, so I've never actually seen that amendment, and it does seem awfully redundant. And, frankly, a little mean-spirited. But, governance can be a tough game.
But not nearly as tough as the "Home Alone" moment the Lovely Mrs. Smith and I had the other day. Which I'm just going to say, again, was her fault.
Now, a moment of exposition. The Lovely Mrs. Smith has many charming quirks (quirks, obsessions,whatever). One of them is that she is always painfully early. And if I, whose career Air Force father used to preach that 10 minutes early is five minutes late, can say that, well, she is obviously the gold medal winner for promptness.
And if a gold medal is actually awarded, she'll be there a full 45 minutes early, just to make sure we can get good parking and find the podium. Which will be the big white thing in the middle of the infield, with no one standing around it because they haven't shown up yet.
We think those who show up for flights a mere hour before takeoff are bringing it in on three wheels. In fact, if we got there any earlier, we'd have come the night before and slept on a bench.
The "flight" thing matters, because thanks to the fact that my wife had to leave for a business trip, I had to take her to the airport Sunday morning. Which means we left Saturday night. OK, not really, but it could have happened.
What was supposed to happen was that our alarms (note the plural: when it comes to timekeeping, we tend to kill an ant with a sledgehammer around here.) would go off at 7 a.m. Her flight left at 11, she wanted to be at the airport at 10, we live about half an hour away. The timing is starting to come together for you, I'm sure.
So when her phone started ringing at 6 a.m., (backup to the backup to the backup), we teetered on the edge of letting it ring (if one of our children got kidnapped, they'd tell their captors to wait for a better time to call or someone was getting an earful).
I mean, everything was set for 7 a.m. What's the deal?
At about this time, a little voice in my head started asking if there wasn't some kind of event taking place this month that I should have remembered. Easter? St. Patrick's Day? National Pi Day? (March 14th, or, 3.14. Who says math nerds don't have a sense of humor?).
And then it all became clear to me -- Daylight Saving Time. And guess who hadn't sprung forward?
For some strange reason, clocks have become my responsibility. Which meant we were suddenly not quite as on time as we usually are.
Now, the story has a somewhat happy ending. Thankfully, phone alarms reset themselves without my help. Even if I remembered to provide it. We made it to the airport in plenty of time (OK, "Rest of the World Standard Time," not "Painfully Early Time."), so all's well that ends with someone on a plane without having to chase it down the runway.
But when it comes time to do the Correction of Errors on this one, the culprit is clear. If you're going to trust something as important as all the timepieces in the house to someone with my attention to detail, well, you deserve what you get. Which makes all that running around a "her" problem.
At least that's my constitutionally protected story and I'm sticking to it.
Commentary on 03/18/2016