Coast here (in London). Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend in Tel Aviv (her evening later than mine) about phones and times and timing. Her telephone kept ringing. "Late!" she said to the ringing beast. "Late!" She answered it and rang off, only to have it ring again. "They don’t understand," she said, speaking of her friends in other countries.
"No, they don’t," I agreed. "People who don’t travel don’t know."
My New York friends are mixed. Some of them speak fluent time difference. Others draw no distinction between calling Long Island and calling Lichtenstein. [Aren't those two places which don't exist, to New Yorkers?] "Oh," they say, surprised, calling me at 2 AM. "Is it that late there? I forgot there was a time difference."
"Uh huh. You see, the earth moves around the sun . . . "
[Not in certain parts of Kansas, it doesn't. That's crazy talk.] {I thought you lot had been to court and back about this. Is there still fear and loathing at the fundament?}
The other day, in the airport lounge, a man was on the telephone with his mobile telephone server, trying to ascertain how to call America (It was hard for him to comprehend two zeros followed by a one; he repeated at least five times.) and how to get incoming calls turned off (which was a ‘not’). "But," he protested sleepily, "people will be calling me at all hours of the morning, because of the time difference . . . differences . . . so I really need the incoming calls turned off."
No, dear, what you need — what we all need, you and my friend in Tel Aviv and my friends in Japan and India and all travelers everywhere — is a crib sheet for friends. Be selfish. Give people dual time-zone clocks and remind them to set the "away" frame to your destination’s hour — before you board the plane (because you won’t remember afterward).
My friend Erica’s father, Ed, was an outdoor writer who flew frequently, back in the day when fewer people did so. He was a widower with a girlfriend and the girlfriend was not savvy as to time zones. Once, Ed was flying back from South America. The girlfriend said she had to pick him up at the airport and take very good care of him, because he was going to be jet-lagged. "No," Erica said, "it won’t be bad. He’s not crossing time zones."
"Yes, he is," said the girlfriend. "He’s flying for hours."
"He’s flying north-south, not east-west," Erica said. "Crossing time zones happens when you move in the same direction as the sunrise."
"It’s a nine-hour flight," the girlfriend said. "He’ll be jet-lagged." [At this point, Center would have gone for coffee. Irish coffee. Hold the coffee.] {But not the whipped cream. I’ll pretend it’s dessert.}
Yet another of my friends (It seems I have many of them.) is in New South Wales. [Like the Old South Wales, but with more minty freshness?] At the moment, she is thirteen hours later than I. When, on Sunday, I return to New York, she’ll be eighteen hours later. Time zones will meet date lines. [Can't do that in certain parts of Kansas, either.] {What can you do, apart from self-replication, which I understand to be mandatory?}
My most confusing era took place when I had a major infection. I was commuting, with my doctor’s permission, back and forth between New York and London, auditioning, racing about and swallowing 1500 mg of Ciproflaxin twice a day. On board flights, bewildered as to whether I’d taken what at all, let alone in a timely fashion, I’d empty the vial onto the airplane table and count pills. Were there twenty-one or twenty-two? How many should there be? When was I, anyway? [You were Einsteinian: "I know who I am, young man. What I do not know is where I am going."] {Was there a young man? You see how doped up I was. I missed everything.}
Believe me, I understand confusion. Try it while you’re mobile. Try having thirteen flights in one month. Try going from New York to London, staying a week, moving on to Tokyo, staying a week, returning to London for a week and then flying to New York before bouncing back to London. It will give you new sympathy for hung-over superballs. Or treat your body with respect and don’t try it. A few years ago, I asked my doctor about full-body scans. He said he didn’t approve of them, because of the radiation. "How bad’s the radiation?" I asked.
"It’s the equivalent of a trans-Atlantic flight," he said.
I thought a moment and said, "I shouldn’t worry."
Maybe I should.
[I've only known Coast at five feet and change. Imagine her at fifty feet.]
Coast and Center, imagining.
