But in this case "can't" can be OK?
I may need Ardith's assistance with this. Ardith? Help!
Rewording the sentence a bit more:
No matter what I do, I can't get a pane of glass home in one piece.
#@%$!! So much for my third attempt to.... [etc.].
Once again I have tried & failed to... [etc.].
I tried three times to... [etc.], but still couldn't manage it.
Here, IMHO it will be relevant to say, that there is both
written text and spoken stories. In the spoken story there
is no way of defining quotation marks.
there is probably a rule that the direct speech from the
sentence must be transformed into indirect speech, without
any quotation marks.
So (maybe) - when we write a story we write it in direct
speech and put it in quotes. But when we tell the same
story we use indirect speech and, accordingly, we switch
tenses to the past.
PS: Although we can also write stories in indirect speech
(however, we hardly find such stories in books).
In this case we must also switch tenses to the past if we
tell about the past.
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