When I was about seven years old (the same age as my daughter is as I publish this) the world seemed to move at an incredibly slow almost glacial pace.
We would often travel around the state visiting relatives up in Cleveland, down in Dayton and elsewhere in various nearby locales.
As most any one knows a two or three hour car trip isn't an all day journey but to a seven year old it may as well be a transcontinental trip.
Even though I believe I could read the time on a clock I didn't have a good grasp of time as it relates to, well, time.
"How much longer?" I would ask. "Oh. forty-five minutes.", mom would say.
Forty-five minutes? My mom and dad might as well have tried to explain to me.
Forty-five minutes? How long is that?
I did what I had to.
If I was going to truly understand what that meant I had ask the same question with a slightly different angle.
"How many Gilligan's Islands is that?" I asked.
Ah yes, I was a Gilligan's Island junkie. I watched the show so often that the half-hour space it occupied had a real sense of time to me.
"Oh, about one and a half episodes I suppose." Mom or Dad would reply.
Aha! Now I understood.
The only way that time (as esoteric as it is), had any meaning to me at age seven.
