Early to bed…
I’m guessing Mitch McConnell was late to church…
Or maybe he just got up on the wrong side of the bed last Sunday morning, but whatever it was, by Tuesday evening the U.S. Senate passed a bill making Daylight Saving Time permanent across the U.S. of A.
Yup, if Mitch’s beddy-bye bill gets past Nancy and the Squad over in the House and the president scrawls his “Joe Biden” at the bottom our semi-annual fumble for the owner’s manual to figure out how to put our dashboard clocks back in sync with the rest of the world will be at an end.
As of November 2023 there’ll be no more springing ahead. No more falling back. No more falling for the foolish fiction that fiddling with the clock alters the amount of time in a day.
There’ll be more days when early risers will be showering in the dark and fewer days when the sun gets off work before the rest of us.
It also means that, twice a year, we won’t all have to reset our bedtimes.
As of late, that’s become something of a big deal. Even though we’ve been doing it since before Og the Caveman went searching for the softest boulder in the cave because the My Pillow guy was a million years off in the future, it feels like it’s been something of a cultural “all of a sudden” that we’ve collectively noticed the pleasure of a good night’s sleep rates right up there with good sex, a hearty dinner and fine distilled spirits.
Now I’m not going to accuse Mitch of being a slow learner, but some of us have known this all along.
It was interesting to read that a CDC survey found nearly half of us report having trouble sleeping and that nearly one out of five say they routinely don’t get enough sleep. At the same time, those who stay up late to study such things, are finding regularly not getting a good night’s sleep contributes to making us fat, broke, sick and stupid…tired and cranky, too.
None of that would have come as news to my mother – well maybe the fat and broke part. She would have figured too much bacon and too many trips to Sears had more to do with such things than too many nights staying up to watch Johnny Carson. Still, whenever she came up with her things-to-do-today list, a couple of naps and a solid night’s snooze never failed to figure near the top of the list.
And when it came to getting her sleep, Mom was a grand master. She’d drape a dishtowel over a rack of damp plates, pots and pans, stroll over to the sofa and announce, “I’m gonna tip over for a few minutes,” close her eyes and be snoring at the count of twenty. By the time those dishes were dry enough to put away, she was up and at it, refreshed and ready to go.
I’m pleased to say that skill is one passed on to me. That inherited ability to doze off quietly almost anytime, almost anywhere has served me well from my high school algebra class to corporate conference calls. I regularly annoy my fellow travelers by closing my eyes on one side of the Atlantic not to open them until we’re about to land on the other – when they arrive rumpled, red-eyed and envious after a sleepless transit. It doesn’t much matter where I may be, when I feel my eyes getting heavy, it’s time for a nap, or better year, a good night’s sleep.
And there are few things to make me more cranky than having that snooze disrupted, interrupted, or, worse yet, prematurely brought to an end – so much so, it leads me to seriously question the existential wisdom of intruding on the attention of the Almighty with a church service at sunrise following a midnight Mass…
That’s a thought to sleep on.