The "Time Is On My Side" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Spent some time working on my stained glass windows that I love to make and also spent the afternoon at the Viva Center playing pool with a few new friends I have made in the past couple of weeks after my wife, Carol, and I moved to Woodcrest Villa which is a retirement community on the western side of the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I recently saw that a local bookmobile would be arriving at Woodcrest for those that would like to check-out a book or two for reading.  You can visit their bookmobile and check out a few books which are to be retuned at a specific time which they would mark in the rear of the book.  There is no charge for the service, as long as you return it on the time marked in the book.  I recently read that someone borrowed a book titled "An Elementary Treatise on Electricity" from a public library in a town in Massachusetts.  The book had recently been returned, but a bit late.  The book was nearly 120 years overdue!  The library director, Olivia Melo  said that, "This is definitely the longest overdue book that we've gotten back.  We do get some books back after, you know, 10, 15 years.  But!!"   That certainly is a record to get a book back over a century late.  I'm surprised that the town in Massachusetts had a public library 120 years ago.  The book, published in 1881 and written by a prominent Scottish physicist, was an early scientific text laying out electrical theories.  It was likely either last checked out on February 14, 1904 or February 14, 1905.  The faded stamp makes it difficult to be certain.  A prior checkout stamp clearly read Dec. 10, 1903.  So...to break that record I would have to go to the bookmobile that is to arrive this week and check out a book and wait until 2145 before I return it!  I told my wife that I just might try it to see if they would miss it until 2145.  She laughed and said, "You'd wouldn't even be here in 2145 to return it.  You'd probably be playing pool and miss the bookmobile when it arrived!  Yeah!  She's probably right.  I do love playing pool!  I'll just skip the bookmobile!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.