On Jan. 13, a San Francisco man returned a book to a library 100 years after the due date. Ironically, the 1909 book of short stories, by F. Hopkinson Smith, was titled Forty Minutes Late.
"[Webb] Johnson's great-grandmother had checked it out from the city's old Fillmore branch in 1917," according to an Associated Press story. "She passed away a week before the due date, and the Fillmore branch is no longer around." The library's current fine-forgiveness program, which runs through Valentine's Day, prompted Johnson to return the book.
That little offbeat news story might have escaped me, but for the fact that I've had time on the brain lately.
As is the case with many of us, I simply wish there were more hours in the day to accomplish all I need to do ... or that I at least had a better grip on time management.
Long fascinated with science fiction time travel themes, I recently -- in, ahem, what some may argue wasn't the finest moment in time management -- indulged in the recent New Year's Eve Twilight Zone marathon. The 'thon afforded the chance to indulge in a cluster of episodes of the vintage TV show that bore this theme ("The Odyssey of Flight 33," "No Time Like the Past," "Back There").
I also recently binge-watched back episodes of NBC's Timeless, a series in which a history professor, a scientist and a military man with combat skills travel to various times and places in American history in pursuit of a criminal who wants to mess with that history.
But my thoughts on the subject of time have especially to do with the simple question: Will I run out of time before doing all I want to do?
Many of us have so-called bucket lists, which doubtless are accompanied by our concern that time will outrun the opportunity to tick off the contents of those lists. Running out of time has different meanings for different people, according to their religious faith or lack thereof. (Obviously, anybody who believed in the Mayan calendar was surprised to find they had more time than they thought.) There's also the concern that, once time and resources exist to tick off items on those lists, good health will be lacking.
In short, we're wasting time fretting about not having enough time.
The story about the library book, however, is quirky fodder for hope, a clear message of better-late-than-never and it's-never-too-late. The book spent a century languishing away from its original home before someone did the honorable thing and returned it. Same with that then-98-year-old message in a bottle -- originally sent out by scientists helping to map ocean currents, bearing a note that promised "a sixpence" to anyone who recorded finding it. It was found in 2012 by a Scottish fisherman. Just like the Fillmore branch of the San Francisco library, sixpence coins don't exist anymore.
But Johnson decided it wasn't too late to return the book and it wasn't too late for the significance of that old oceanic experiment to be recognized. The book and the bottle were inanimate objects. But we can certainly be inspired to think of some positive things we can set in motion now to be enjoyed by others later, whether it's helping to build a library, supporting valuable scientific research or just imparting good knowledge into a youngster's head.
Two never-too-late stories I've come across involve people: the 85-year-old couple who, also in 2012, remarried after divorcing 50 years earlier. And the 85-year-old Delaware woman who, in November, participated in the nuptials of her 51-year-old friend ... not as a mother-of-the-bride figure ... not even as a bridesmaid ... but as a flower girl.
We can make those lofty "bucket list" entries of goggling the kangaroos in the Australian bush, learning to cook in Paris or, heck, becoming that ballerina all of us little girls said we wanted to be in grade school. But the elderly remarried couple and the elderly flower girl serve as indirect inspiration for penciling in spontaneous, easily obtainable entries to those lists, making time to do them and valuing them just as much.
There's no time travel in real life. We can't get lost time back. But we can redeem the time -- "buy it up" and make the most of it.
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Style on 01/22/2017