It's About Time

- Philadelphia Flyers wall clock $79.00

When time is on my side, I find it relaxing to immerse myself headfirst into personal projects for commercial gain. Because of its uniqueness, my latest creation took two months to put together.

First, I mail ordered a nifty wall clock that featured a function to record five second audio sound bites which play at the top of every hour. When it arrived on my doorstep about ten days later, it was time to play with father time. On the plain face of the clock, I substituted attention-grabbing pictures of members from the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers team for unadorned numerals.

The next step involved obtaining actual game commentary from this championship season that would coincide with the position of each player’s picture on the clock. I remembered a promotional item from my privileged childhood when Philadelphia sports teams actually won championship games. Thanks to Ebay’s exhaustive search engine, I won a vintage 1974 LP entitled Champions Again, a record that relives the actual play-by-play calls during that banner season. To attract handsome bids, my fine upstanding Ebay seller went out of his way to advertise in bold print like this that the record was factory sealed and never opened. When it arrived in the mail like a blue line special, my utility knife couldn’t wait to slice open the crackling cellophane and smell its trapped newness. Like a birth thirty years in the making, I removed the record from its fold. I didn’t even need to bring the record cover to my nose to knows it smelled rancid. Small but noticeable water stained markings also defaced the cover. Although deemed more brand spanking new than a baby’s behind, the record itself bore the smudgy fingerprints of its original owner. I dusted for fingerprints but this magic trick cost me at the box office. The record and I both felt about as good as used. Buyer beware because Ebay is full of sly foxes in the corporate henhouse. No worse for ware, the used record looked like it had enough grit to spin around a few more times.

I now needed something archaic to play it on. It might have been easier asking Kate Smith to sing the national anthem at this year’s Flyers home playoff games than finding a record player for sale. I went round and round in the first three stores I visited. Once I found a nostalgic record player for sale, it had to be back ordered. When it came in, I chomped at the diamond bit to finish this project. Soon a forty four year old balding man could be seen spinning a record without music to relive sports moments of his lost childhood. Hours passed in not only my glee but in my obsessive struggle to narrow down my best dozen sound bites for each hour on the clock. When I came to terms with my decision-making, I recorded the distinguished voice of announcer Gene Hart for all of sixty seconds.

Only sheer irony allowed me to finish this project on the eve of this year’s Philadelphia Flyers playoff run for Lord Stanley's Cup. Time flies when you are having fun and this adage has withstood the test of time. Come to think of it, thirty years have passed since the Philadelphia Flyers won the Stanley Cup. Like my new wall clock, it’s about time.