Did you all just get an hour younger?

Although the end of Daylight Savings Time means nothing in Seychelles … the days are all divided almost equally, give-or-take a few minutes either way, into twelve hours of light / twelve hours of dark all year round, so there’s no need for adjustments … I still feel a tiny twang of sadness when the clocks go back in other parts of the world.

The early days of PDT in my life were rife with discussions about bed times on school nights, and protests of, But it’s not even dark yet!, but we kids all knew that summer vacation was just around the corner, so we got the hang of falling asleep before night fell and looked forward to ever-lengthening days ahead.

With no effort at all, I can conjure those long summer nights of the 1950s playing “Mother May I?” and “Green Light / Red Light” with neighbor kids in the backyard of our then-new and ever so boxy suburban tract home in Pleasant Hill, California.

But it couldn’t last.

Passing back into Standard Time meant another summer had slipped away, and what was left ahead but month after month of schedules and school work and drizzle and fog? Knowing the Christmas holiday wasn’t far off helped a bit, but nonetheless the ritual of setting the clocks back … sacrificing an entire hour as if it hadn’t existed … was a melancholy duty.

(Sure, we got to do that hour all over again, but what happened to everything everyone in the Pacific Time Zone did and thought and felt in that specific 60 minutes? Such were my thoughts as a child. I’ve never been easy.)

I feel it from here. Even though my clocks don’t change by as much as a minute, I’m now twelve hours from my mother instead of the eleven I was yesterday, and the distance between me and my daughter and granddaughter is nine negative hours rather than the eight I’ve been calculating at least a couple of times a day for the past months.

Yes, I know we’ll get it all back next year … the hour is returned to us and the time-distance shrinks again … but today I’m a bit sad about the loss of time.

The most mysterious of all my friends, a woman of inscrutability and enigmatic ways, who also happens to be a terrific writer and wonderful wit in her spare time, has written about this tinkering with time on her blog. I love her proposal for a valuable application of the hour shift, and so share it with you:

Tomorrow we move our clocks back an hour. That means one hour to live over again. I think we should be able to pick the hour… from all the hours of our lives. Not to change it… just to have it back one more time. And in the spring, when we jump ahead one hour, we could pick the one hour in our lives from which we want to erase the fact that we were there.

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