Where Did the Time Go?
It was only 11:00am in New York and the entire Saturday loomed ahead of Sean to do with as he pleased. He had come from Edinburgh, Scotland, where it was 4:00pm and folks were getting ready for their night out and on the town. Sean wasn’t quite sure if he was done with the day or ready to take it on. He was not new to foreign travel so jet lag and time zones were hardly a new thing for him. But today felt different for some reason.
The United Airlines flight attendant had bumped his elbow perhaps forty times in the past seven hours and Sean wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or sympathetic. United had long since given up on profiling flight attendants by body type so this one was rather broad abeam. Sean is a beefy lad himself so he recognized a narrow aisle when he saw one, but flight attendants were supposed to be nimble and unobtrusive. This one was not unfriendly, but Sean’s elbow could attest that she could hardly go unnoticed.
Sean had actually gotten some sleep on this flight which was, unfortunately, getting more and more rare in his advancing years. He found it interesting that in years gone by when he was humping the Latin American routes, he would regularly sleep 8-10 hours on the long north/south routes. And those were the days when even first class seats would only recline to about 45 degrees, unlike the business class flat sleeper seats he now traveled. The airlines had perfected the ergonomics of sleeper seat design, just as Sean’s aging bones and joints rebelled against anything that was not his own pillow-top mattress. Lucky for Sean, he liked movies and writing enough to occupy him on long transatlantic flights like this one over the Pond.
Sean had turned sixty five last month and it had occasioned lots of thoughts. He had never been highly age-conscious, but there was something about the historic retirement age that made him think inordinately about his life. He had taught courses and written books about pensions and retirement. It was a bit of a natural area of interest to him anyway. His favorite retirement age story was about how the modern defined benefit pension really came into vogue after WWII when returning servicemen were in the driver seat with employers and they wanted to lure these hardened veterans with the promise of leisure in their old age. Retiring at sixty-five was appealing. Funny thing was that in 1946 the average American male life expectancy was sixty-three. What a racket, right?
Sean was always looking for anomalies like that, more for their humor than their demographic or economically predictive value. And now he had latched onto another. He wondered if there were any correlation between time zone shifting and aging. Sean happened to be working in the scientific research area at the moment (pure serendipity and not based on training), and it occurred to him that the Theory of Relativity might have some impact on the life of the traveling man. If time was the fourth dimension and people like him were always messing with their time zone status, was there any cause and effect to that?
First of all, Sean felt that these days, flights were increasingly like suspended animation. Meals were served more on the pattern of the flight schedule at departure and the time of arrival. Flying from Scotland in the morning meant serving a big breakfast meal and then a light lunch prior to landing at 5:00pm body-clock time. The other way involved a dinner at 9:00pm and a light breakfast at 2:00am body-clock time. The needs of the airline are served rather than the organism being time-shifted. Do you remember the Jeff Goldblum remake or the Ray Milland original version of The Fly? It was about time-shifting when the atomic structure of the transportee got jumbled up with that of a wayward fly. Goldblum and Milland started growing large hairs on their back and we all got grossed out. Maybe our anatomy is being jumbled up with the airline equivalent of the fly, which could be equated perhaps to the United flight attendants. Sean had noted a higher than normal grumpiness in his demeanor lately.
If we liken time travel to suspended animation, the question logically becomes; do we just risk getting grumpy or indigestion or might there be a bigger anti-aging effect? I know on the occasions I traveled on the SST “Sharp-Nose”, I always felt particularly exuberant when getting off. I certainly didn’t feel 2:40 hours younger, but there was something there. Maybe Relativity is a continuum rather than a threshold at the speed of light, such that you age less, rather than not at all during your travel. That is more sensical than you thought it would be, right?
Sean was getting excited about this modification to Einstein’s work. He started thinking about a Nobel Prize. Then it dawned on him. His normal pattern, as with most global nomads, was to fly east then west or west then east. That would result in more or less neutral aging outcome, wouldn’t it? So maybe everyone should just fly west? Imagine the ramifications on air travel. Ponce de Leon Airlines has a certain ring to it. Could we all reverse the aging process doing this? Maybe there was a whole new industry in this. Spas had penetrated the airport market. Maybe it was time they breached the boarding gantry. Spas of the future might all be westward-traveling aircraft. And what about those pilots and flight attendants? There would have to be regulation governing this whole thing. Sean’s mind was exploding.
Sean deplaned as normal in Newark. He and a handful of the passengers ran the Immigration Control Dash. He whipped his passport into the Global Entry machine, circumventing the U.S.Resident passport lines. He scooted past the folks waiting for luggage at the baggage claim and out the Nothing-to-Declare passage. It was like using Clear to get past the security check lines on the way in. Sweet. He was jazzed by his new theories and was feeling younger already. He had pre-ordered his Uber, so he hit the street just as his Uber arrived.
Sean’s mind was ablaze with possibilities. And then, the Uber got to Jersey City and Sean saw the real fly in the ointment. Whatever time gain all his best travel planning allowed, not even Einstein had figured out how to beat the traffic delays at the Holland Tunnel. Bumper-to-bumper traffic and the ticking clock caused the glow to fade on his cheek. Sean decided that he needed to spend more time at the drawing-board on this idea before it was ready for prime time. Time was tricky that way.