Everybody Loves A Mystery

Everybody loves a mystery. I am not referring to the mysteries of life, and we all know there are many of those. The mystery I am talking about are more in the vein of who-killed-Professor-Plum-in-the-library-with-a-wrench, type of mystery. The sheer popularity of this genre over the years as demonstrated by the number of novels, movies, television shows and newspapers articles that outlined the unknown, the unanswered and the unexplained can attest to that. Kingston has had its own share of mysteries over the years. We can look back to the earliest days of the city or examine the most recent of crimes in the pages of our newspaper to try and understand the unknown. I know I have played amateur detective when looking at some of Kingston’s most famous or infamous mysteries. The popularity of the Ghost Walk of Kingston, which takes people on a walking tour of some of the more famous ghostly stories of our past shows the fascination most people have about things they do not know the answer to.

The reason I brought this up is that I was faced with a mystery of my own just a few months ago and spent many hours analyzing the events to try and get some sort of understanding of what occurred. As I mentioned, everyone loves a mystery and I am no exception.

I awoke one morning after an especially unrested, fitful sleep, even before my alarm sounded at my usual time. I skipped my morning exercise, grabbed a quick breakfast and made my way into work. Like most people, first thing in the morning is not the time of day to be at the top of my game. It usually takes a little while before my consciousness catches up with me. I got into the office, mostly by rote, just following the car ahead of me. Once there, I had turned my computer on and starting going through my morning rituals, which mostly entailed of me shaking my head a few times to clear the cobwebs. I checked my email to see if there were any pressing matters to be attended to. I took a look at the time located on the taskbar of my computer and then glanced at the watch on my wrist, a gleaming new one I bought just a few short weeks before and saw that my computer time was off. That in itself is not surprising, most people have encountered a dying battery in their computer before or a situation where the system has re-booted itself to a different day and sometime year. I simply reset the time to match my watch. I continued on like any other day until someone asked me what time it was. I told them and was quickly corrected by virtually everyone in earshot. It turned out my computer had the right time and my gleaming new watch did not. After years of always having the latest advances in many things, I have settled back into old and familiar and this is true with my watch. No longer did I want or need a watch that could tell me where I was on the earth (and believe me, there were times that I needed that information), what time it was in any of twenty four time zones or even have the ability to change a television station. All I wanted was a watch that would tell me the time of day and maybe what day of the month it was. I had opted for an old style analogue watch by a well known manufacturer. It cost me about a week’s wages, which shows one of two things, either I paid a lot for it or it is a very cheap watch. But given the circumstances that the watch had not stopped before and I didn’t do anything to make it start going again, the only certainty was that I was out twenty minutes. Twenty minutes out of my life that were for all intense and purposes, unexplained. At my age, losing any time out of my life is a matter of note. Using the astute logic and reasoning I am known for, my only conclusion was I had been abducted by aliens. That would explain the bad sleep, the bad dreams I was sure I was having and the strange markings on my body. Of course, when I expounded on my theory, I was met with blank stares (a blank look that seemed frighteningly similar to those eyes I saw in my dreams) and the usual amount of disbelief from non-believers. My wife who throughout most of my life has rallied to my side in times of confusion was for the most part.... disbelieving. I was so absolutely sure of my experience that I had now started to sleep with a half-cocked eye, so I would be fully aware of any nocturnal events. I was searching my body for those tiny pinpricks you always read about in the Enquirer. My television shows of choice no longer surrounded comedy and even “24" took a backseat to the Space Channel as I tried to compare my own meeting of the third kind to that of others. It was all encompassing at times. Was I yet another chapter in the abductions that are splashed across the pages of some of the more noteworthy publications that grace our grocery check out line? Would my experiences come out in the middle of some hypnotic trance that would be so terrifyingly real that my hair would turn white? These are the mysteries that keep me going from day-to-day.

In this particular case, the mystery was resolved in the most scientific of ways. When I was pulling a T-shirt over my head, a string of thread caught on the winding stem of my new watch and pulled it out to the first stage position, stopping the watch. By pushing it in, the watch started again. There was my missing twenty minutes. The whole basis of this abduction experience was now more of a case of tossing and turning in a fitful sleep. The strange markings on my body? On reflection they were most likely from the vinyl lawn chair in my yard. Bad dreams? Could be anything from a pizza too late at night to dredging up the memories of a horrible alien abduction movie like,”Night Skies” which I watched with my kids a while ago. So there went my personal mystery and my hopes for immortality in the legends of alien encounters. Now back to drudgery of everyday life. That is, until the next mystery grabs a hold of me.