Remember when you were little, and just learning to tell time? It seemed very mystical at first, and equally fun, sometimes confusing. Unfortunately, once you learned how it worked, suddenly it was out of your control. As you get older, you spend more of your time worrying about time -- how quickly it seems to pass, what time you need to be someplace, the amount of time it takes to get from Point A to Point B, and of course, how much time is left until dinner!

For a lot of people these days, children and adults, every single minute of time is scheduled. True, school and work are a part of most everyone's life, at some point. But there are plenty of people whose spare time is all mapped out, to the last minute. Have you ever gone on vacation, and had your time planned as far as where you would go, and when? Sometimes you come back, and you are more frazzled then before, because you never took time to just relax.

Time zones are also confusing. You learn about them in elementary school, usually as part of geography class, but they seem completely meaningless until you experience the differences yourself, or you need to know whether or not your long-distance phone call is going to wake someone else up in the middle of the night.

When I was growing up, our family moved a lot -- sometimes more than once during the course of a normal school year. But since we were all living in the same place, in the same house, time zones were never really an issue. We also used to take some kind of vacation every summer, but once again, we would all be together, and usually either in the same time zone where we lived, or a close one, where it was an hour's difference one way or the other.

Once I got married, I moved to northern Indiana, where my husband was attending graduate school. There was an hour's difference in the time from where the rest of my family lived, in West Virginia and Maryland. The first year we lived in Indiana, one of my sisters called me at 11:00 p.m. on New Year's Eve to wish me a Happy New Year. I said thank you, then pointed out that we still had an hour to wait before it would actually be the New Year for us. This piece of information astonished my sister, who said she guessed she'd just always thought that New Year's was the same time everywhere. I mentioned that people in California would be celebrating the arrival of a new year in the early evening if that were true. Well, this became quite a subject of discussion. I might add that this was also the sister who was considered by just about everyone to be "the smart one."

A few years later, we were visiting my husband's family in Pittsburgh the same day that the Kentucky Derby was taking place. At the time, one of his sisters was living with her family in The Philippines, where her husband was stationed. I suggested that since she was a day ahead of us, time zone-wise, that we call her, find out who won the Kentucky Derby; since it hadn't actually happened yet where we were, we could bet on the winner and make a fortune. Then we all laughed, except my former sister-in-law, whose eyes got wide, as she said, "Oh my God, we should do that! I'll bet a lot of people don't realize they could do it that way!" Let me just say two things about this: a) she was completely serious, and b) she was also supposed to be "the smart one."

I will admit to being flummoxed by a time zone change myself (hard to believe, but true). Though not when I've traveled to California, or the Midwest. Nope, my time zone zone-out happened in Newfoundland a few years ago. My husband was attending a professional meeting, so we decided that I would go along, and we would take some extra days and have a little vacation. Here was the confusing part: Newfoundland is one and a half hours ahead of us! Once I was there, I didn't have trouble figuring out what time it was, since I adjusted my watch on arrival. But it did throw me off when I had to call someone at home. For some reason, I could deal with one hour ahead, or two hours ahead, but one and half hours was a true puzzlement to me! And since the TV listings were for all of eastern Canada, most of which was in the same time zone that I was used to, I could never figure out when to turn on the TV to see the news! (Ahem. Of course, I only wanted to see the news ... as everyone knows the rest of TV is a waste ... except of course, for reruns of "Mister Ed," which weren't running in Newfoundland. Anyway, that's another issue altogether.) In my defense, may I point out that as far as I know, I've never been designated as "the smart one."

How does trying to understand time become so complicated? And why? There's a James Taylor song called "The Secret O' Life" which claims that "the secret o' life is enjoying the passage of time," and at one point says, "Einstein said he could never understand it all" -- and wasn't he considered one of " the smart(est) ones"?