 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Soon we will all, here in the delightful, foliage blessed Eastern Time Zone, be called upon to fall back. Only a few short weeks ago we had to spring forward. The clock in my car did not bother to spring forward and thus will be allowed to tick along, correct again. The clocks in the rest of my life will not be so lucky.
The daylight that will be saved or squandered from the collective leap backward will not be apparent to any of us. No, we will rise in the dark and go home in the dark and we will not be able, no matter how hard we try, to catch all of the clocks in their sudden loss of an hour. When this devilish tinkering with time began, most households had but a single clock. Our appliances did not feature embedded timepieces, our wrists were not decked out with fancy Rolex watches, and whatever synchrony we sported did not require locating a three language manual. No, at most, we shoved a minute hand around until it was sort of right and cut ourselves some slack as we trudged out to our predawn cow milking destinations. The cows were, in my case, figurative. But according to my dad who had once tended some and spent much of his life being very grateful for not having farm chores ever again, they were fussy creatures who required an awful lot of tending. Still, as I contemplate running down a herd of, not cows but clocks, all of them with different needs and all of them essential to the successful pursuit of modern life (in the stove, the microwave, on my wrist, in the big computer, in the little computer, with radio and annoying alarm, running on trained electrons, quartz crystals, AA, AAA, D and C batteries and a six-feet-tall pendulum job with a brass face saying “Tempis Fugit”, which strikes on the quarter-hour and does not agree with any other clock in the house and has to be ignored in order to get any sleep and given new impetus every five days by pulling on its chains) I think even a small bovine would be easier to take care of than all these chiming, churning, clicking, mostly wrong by several minutes timepieces. Only one of them knows enough to leap and fall on its own -- the one in my Macintosh. And there’s always at least one lurking in a corner or on a wall, to be forgotten until the day I use it to time an appointment. In deepest December the excuse that I had not adjusted my clock to return from daylight savings time, well, that is not going to cut any ice with the dentist, hairdresser, veterinarian or friend whose schedule is going to be messed up by my being late or early, I forget which, in the non-standard daylight saving time.
Of course, the linear nature of time (early to rise making us wise and cranky) is under debate in some of the more esoteric realms of mathematics and physics, whose inhabitants regard time as a bit more elastic than allowed for in more quotidian zones. Why, if we could only get those quantum theorists and arcane practitioners of chronology to come to our rescue there would surely be no question of daylight savings — we would squander that daylight at will, happily allowing all of our clocks their own sweet time, each to its own. I’m for it. In all the assorted ballot questions in my Commonwealth’s upcoming election, (no or yes on greyhound racing, yes or no, reduction of income taxes, etc.) none would be more welcome to me than a banishment of the twice yearly nonsense that ruins our circadian rhythm and toys with our relationship with dawn, that rosy fingered, mischievous harbinger of ... coffee. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jean Blake White is a regular contributor to The Meadow.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
