During a pre-teen growth spurt, I told my mother that my blanket no longer covered my toes. She asked, “What about your shoulders and neck?” “No problem there, Mom.”
So she set out to correct the problem by saying she’d cut a foot off the top of the blanket and sew it to the bottom.
That solution is like Daylight Saving Time, which changes things without changing them.
Things generally don’t return to normal at the Trujillo household until roughly the middle of January and the middle of July. Why? Those periods are about as far away as you can get from one time change without bumping into the other.
We’ve weathered the return to Standard Time, in effect since just before Halloween, but my wife Bonnie still badgers me about the time. We’re blessed with several clocks throughout the house (we counted 43 actual timepieces if you include cars, watches, computers, cell phones and PDAs).
So yesterday, more than two weeks into the back-again time change, she asked me, “What time is it?” I replied, it’s 4:07, my delight.” Her response: “I can see the clock from here. I want to know what time it is — really.”
What “really” really means, “What time would it have been if we were still on the other time? What time would it be if Ben Franklin had never been born?”
“Other time” refers to both Standard and Daylight Saving — it just depends on the time of year it gets asked. And it does get asked.
From the outset, let me say I’m a supporter of Daylight Saving Time as long as it’s in effect. Via an act of congress, time zones got organized, but various states have opted out, notably Arizona, where no matter the season, it’s always dark at 7 p.m., just when people want to fire up their barbecue grills.
I’ve always struggled with the terms the media use to remind us of a time change. We hear, “Be sure to set your clock back an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday.”
I can’t think of clocks in terms of back and forward, much like I have to think about the which is which when I hear about someone driving his convertible with his top up (or down). Open or closed?
Being literal minded, I can understand when someone says, “At 2 a.m., set your clock to 3 a.m. (or 1 a.m.).”
Daylight Saving Time, first broached by Franklin as “a way to help the farmers,” causes much consternation for an event that really doesn’t “give us an extra hour of daylight.” The change, in theory is to allow farmers to take advantage of an extra hour of daylight during the summer. So, if it’s really 7, and time to plow the fields, DST makes it 6, dark enough for you to stumble around.
For events that really don’t change a thing, time changes require lots of effort twice a year. In the olden days, when everyone owned an electric clock or wind-up watch, making the change was a snap.
A teacher once asked, “How do we teach the concept of clockwise and counter-clockwise to school children who own digital watches?” Good point.
In April, all we need to do is advance the time one hour (many times, depending on the number of timepieces). But turning a digital timepiece 23 hours back is agony. Not too long ago, I needed to reserve almost a whole day to reset clocks in my parents’ house. That task negated any hours I had gained courtesy of Ben Franklin and his Daylight Saving pals. Once Mom even wanted to tip me for almost figuring out the blasted clock-changing mechanism in her Chevy Nova.
Disconnecting the battery cable was easier.
Didn’t digital car clocks used to have two tiny recesses, reached with a pen point, one for minutes, one for hours?
Last November, when I bought a car at Enchantment Motors, salesman Bob Abreu dutifully showed me the bells and whistles, including programming stations on the radio and setting the time.
Setting the time was, shall we say, time-consuming. Abreu turned on the radio, held a button down, waited for some flashing lights and told me to pay attention. “Now, Art, if you’ll turn to page 6,432 of your owner’s manual . . .” I think sitting through a college lecture would have been less stressful — my fault, not Bob’s. If one doesn’t act quickly during the winking and blinking of clock lights, the procedure cancels itself. I may need to have Bob set my clock again and leave me out of it.
Along with the time changes come various beliefs, some based on truth, some whimsical:
• Cats howl an hour longer at night when there’s an extra hour of darkness.
• Depending on the season, VCRs, which always blink “12:00,” start blinking “11:00, 11:00” or “1:00, 1:00.”
• When standard time returns, you’re 8.33 percent more likely to meet a vampire.
• People who show up late for work and blame it on the lost hour never show up an hour early at the other end of the calendar.
• The second hand of an analog watch breaks when you try to turn the watch backwards, guaranteeing seven years of bad luck. Where do you replace the second hand? At the second-hand store, naturally.
• When it comes time to set back your clock, you shouldn’t do the same to your bathroom scale.
• Only a man who’s visited a proctologist knows the true meaning of the term “spring forward.”
For a short time in the ‘60s, parts of Illinois were being considered as distinct quarter-hour time zones within the Central Time Zone.
At the time, a friend, a practicing Catholic with a latitude, invited me to join him on a short drive to an earlier time zone. He’d planned on receiving the sacraments the following day and knew that Catholics in that diocese were not allowed to consume any food after midnight.
So my friend ordered a burger in the earlier zone and consumed it before the witching hour. But as we drove the few miles back to the later zone, he unthinkingly popped a french fry into his mouth.
I suggested driving back. “Will anyone ever know?” I asked.
But as a man of principle, my friend skipped communion in the morning.