It’s that time
If this is Sunday, I’m feeling like I went to bed an hour too late and got up an hour too early.
Yup, daylight saving time has snuck up on us again.
Ok, it really didn’t sneak up. We’ve known this morning was coming since we set our clocks back way back when the leaves were falling and we were rummaging around to find that left-hand glove we lost track of last winter. Fiddling with the clock has become a semi-annual ritual which has traditionally put families out of synch with church services, disrupted baby’s nap time and confused the family dog. But no matter the situation, we’re still starting the day felling sadly shortchanged on shuteye and vaguely discombobulated by a lunchtime arriving an hour ahead of the appetite even though we’re more than ready for that postprandial snooze.
For the most part we just accept it as another seasonal annoyance – like the cryogenically preserved dog poop emerging as the snow pack recedes and how the sighting of the first neighbor sporting early season cutoffs is a reminder of just how many really white people populate the upper Midwest. For the most of us, setting sunset back by an hour is a welcome temporal adjustment, though for early risers it spells an added hour of stumbling about in the pre-dawn darkness while feeling smugly superior to the slug-a-beds oblivious to the sun’s delayed arrival.
Mom was no fan of the government monkeying with the time of day. She averred the only time the Good Lord reset the cosmic clock was when old Joshua and the Israelites needed an extra hour to finish whipping the Amorite’s army at Gibeon -- and she didn’t see any Amorites making trouble in Houston County. People were meant to live by sun-time, Switching to summer-time and back just got folks’ digestive systems confused and kept babies from getting to bed when they should’ve.
Theology aside, it seems Mom was on to something – it’s not wise to fool with Mother Nature. It seems that scientists on the news pages have joined Dagwood, Garfield and Beetle Baily in putting sweet slumber on a pinnacle of everyday importance. Research has determined that sound sleep, and getting enough of it, is as important to health and well-being as pretty much anything we do while we’re awake. Consequently, a goodly number of sleep experts not featured on the comics page caution that arbitrarily resetting the whole country’s bedtime spring and fall might have a definite downside, even if it does give folks and extra hour of daylight to cut the lawn.
Personally, I’m relatively indifferent. The dawn’s early light finds me tucked snuggly under the covers be it the solstice or the equinox, hence taking a bit more sunlight before and after suppertime makes my day a more pleasant one – though central heating and improvements on Mr. Edison’s light bulb pretty well challenges the midwinter darkness with a simulacrum of the light and warmth of a summer’s eve. As to the shock to the system inflicted by awakening to a world with clocks reset by an hour, it would seem the effect to be no more severe than spending the weekend in Indianapolis or Rapid City – depending on the season. A change of time zone, a reset clock, or a weekend Netflix binge … we’ll doubtless survive only slightly worse for wear.
Still, if I had my druthers I’d druther we just left summer-time be the time year-round and skip the four dark and miserable months when we revert to the local derivative of traditional Greenwich Mean Time. Life would be simpler and twice a year I wouldn’t have to dig out owner’s manuals to figure out how to reset the clock in my car … in the thermostat on my wall ,.. on my kitchen stove … the microwave … my coffee pot and the rest of the flashing, blinking digital displays technology inflicts upon our lives. I envy Joshua. He only had to reset the sun.