Estimating Time

I stopped wearing a watch at some point as a young man and have never gone back to it. Whether that is horse that taught me to estimate time after a twenty-year stretch or cart that allowed me to forego that I don't know. But I am very good, sometimes exceptionally good at this for some reason.  I am not often good at those pre-tech skills like sense of direction or estimating distance or amounts, so it is mildly surprising. Yet even in childhood, when as a car game to shut us up my mother would say "tell me when we have gone a mile" and I would look at the speedometer and move the dial up or down for when it was a minute or two minutes later, I sometimes nail it within a second or two.  Even now,when I set the timer for seven minutes, or decide to walk for 90 minutes, I am spot on nine times out of ten.

Yet here's the thing.  That tenth time I can be wildly off. There is a time-counting mechanism in my brain which allows me to daydream and come back somehow, but once in a while it shuts off and I show up at the party with potato salad for the afternoon feast, not noticing that the sun has long since set and I should have been bringing an evening dessert heavy with chocolate or alcohol or both. Or the cheese toast has been broiling for 27 minutes and is inedibly crisped and on the path to household fire danger.