By 3:16 a.m., all 2.5 million persons living within the thirteen colonies have awakened and begun the day.
At exactly 5:02 a.m., Thomas Jefferson snapped at one of his six hundred slaves for purportedly taking too long to prepare his egg. He fluffed a ruffle in his collar and wondered why no one respected or understood all he did to secure individuals their freedom!
Around 7 a.m., as he’s having a bit of sweetcorn and porridge, Charles Carroll of Carrollton begins to second guess himself. “Why only sign my name ‘Charles Carroll of Carrollton?’ That could really be referring to anyone with my shared moniker and birthplace,” he thinks. “A legal document of such magnitude,” he considers, after taking a sizable bite of corn, “should surely invoke greater specificity on my part.”
At 8:25 a.m., a twenty-four-year-old woman named Betsy begins to panic. Her mother-in-law, Mrs. Ross, has her annual day of baptismal celebration in two days and fog-brained Betsy has no fineries to offer her! “Perhaps,” she thinks to herself, “I’ll stitch up a tea towel!” There were only white, red, and blue scraps of cloth left in the darning cupboard, but once Betsy put those thimbles on, she was ready to roll.
Just before 9:54 a.m., a nondescript (and rather lethargic) member of the Continental Congress decides he doesn’t care what the bloody thing says. They’ve been staring at the same bloody scratch of parchment for two days, the edits his comrades were proposing were of the itty-bitty-est significance, and he was ready to don his silk sleeping clothes and eat a bloody muffin with some molasses.
At precisely 10 a.m., Oliver Wheeling, the particularly portly eleven-year-old son of local dairy farmer James T. Wheeling, was kicked in the noggin by a goat. Upon noticing his son’s unconscious, chubby figure laying in the stable, his father muttered, “Oh bollocks. Not again.”
A local tradesman who specialized in nonviolent, brilliantly colored aerial explosions starved to death at 11:07 a.m. In his final moments he contemplated, “If only I had found a way to market these damned things.”
12:18 p.m.: Benjamin Franklin picked a most bothersome wedgie.
Around 1:04 p.m., a young, zesty violinist cracked his knuckles. Tuned his strings. Smoothed back his centrally parted hair. And counted three daytime hours before he might absolutely shred at tonight’s concerto.
Though it is an inanimate object, the ink arranged to form the letters J-O-H-N H-A-N-C-O-C-K begins to feel a bit self-conscious at around 4:16 p.m. Is it taking up too much space? Does it look too gaudy? Too ostentatious? Will everyone stare? It wishes it were just an ordinary “thus,” “such,” or “utterly” tucked away unobtrusively in the body of the document.
5:21-8:26 p.m.: A mathematically minded young parishioner gets caught in a grey-haired, monotoned protestant minister’s impromptu three-hour speech regarding the Old Testament principles visible within these modern political adjustments; she recorded herself blinking 3,651 times. (It should be noted that the minister was one of those infuriating persons whose pronunciation of the word “mature” rhymed with “manure,” not “fur.”)
8:41 p.m.: An exhausted mother of eleven-and-a-half children threatens that if they have not bedded themselves by her thrice count, she will not be making any shadow puppets that evening.