by Sunday gave me sixty extra minutes and a thermostat with a different opinion about all of them.
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Bohiney) – The clocks went back overnight, which means I woke at what my body insisted was seven and my kitchen insisted was six. Of all the arguments I have with objects, the one with the stove clock is the longest-running. It is still on the old time. It will be on the old time until spring, out of what I can only call principle.
The Extra Hour, Itemized
Everyone says they will use the extra hour well. I made a list in advance, which is a thing I do when I distrust myself, and I can now report how it went.
- Read one chapter of an early novel, the kind where a heroine faints on page nine and revives on page eleven with a stronger vocabulary.
- Reset every clock in the house. Completed: eleven of twelve.
- Argue with the twelfth clock, which belongs to my neighbor Dolores and which she insists is correct.
- Stand in the hallway for a while, holding a mug, thinking about time.
- Go to the market.
I achieved items two through five. The novel is still on page nine.
What the Almanac Knew
Here is a thing I find consoling. In the colonial period an almanac was the most widely printed object in many households, and a large part of its job was to tell you when the sun would rise and set. Nobody voted on it. Nobody introduced a bill. The sun simply showed up when the table said it would, or else the printer got letters. I am speaking in general terms, from years of handling these things in reading rooms, and I mean only to say that a society once settled the question of daylight with a small book and a lot of nerve.
We have since replaced the small book with a federal statute, and I would like to report on the state of the statute. According to Spectrum News 13 in Orlando, the House passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July, and the bill then stalled in the Senate. Florida Senator Rick Scott backs it and says the country is tired of changing the clocks. The report notes that President Trump has also supported keeping the extra evening daylight.
On the other side is Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who opposes the bill and warns that dark winter mornings could endanger children at school bus stops and people who start work early. I want to note, with a straight face, that this is a genuine bipartisan disagreement in which the two positions are both about children, mornings and light, and neither can be settled by a majority vote of anyone who has tried to find a bus stop in the dark.
A Technicality Worth Savoring
The best detail in the report is a legal one. Florida is among 19 states that have passed laws for year-round daylight saving time. The same story explains that those laws cannot actually take effect, because the federal Uniform Time Act lets a state choose standard time all year but does not let it choose daylight saving time all year. The Tampa Bay edition of the same report carries the same explanation. So nineteen legislatures have passed laws that sit in a drawer, like a coat that has never been worn but is repeatedly mentioned.
It reminds me of the coffeehouse essay, a form I teach in the second week of every term. A man sits in a public room and announces to strangers what ought to be done about the nation. Everyone in the room agrees something should be done. Nothing is done. The difference is that the old essayists had the decency to be funny about it.
The Market, Where Time Is Perishable
By eleven I was at the indoor winter farmers market, where the tomato vendor, a man of enormous calm, wears a hat I have never seen him remove. The stall was nearly empty. I asked after the tomatoes. He turned his phone toward me without a word and showed me a report on Cornell tomatoes that can sense shortages.
“They know,” he said, as though he had been waiting a long time to say it. I bought two jars of last summer’s sauce. Nothing about that morning, including the vendor, made me want to disagree with a tomato.
Dolores and the Twelfth Clock
On the way home I found Dolores on the stoop with a stepladder and her clock under one arm. She had decided that the rest of the neighborhood had been wrong and that she would stay on her own time until further notice. I respect that more than I can say. We agreed to compromise by both being wrong together, on opposite schedules, in the same hallway.
That evening I put my feet up and thought about the Senate, which has had since July to choose a clock and has chosen instead to remain, officially, a person standing in a hallway holding a mug. I do not say this as criticism. I do it myself.
Evening Notes
If you want a plain guide to the line between commentary and news, I keep sending people to this explainer on what commentary is and what it is not, and for something lighter I recommend the London desk at The London Prat. The world is not short of clocks that disagree, and I find the company comforting.
I write most evenings, and there are more of my daily notes at Bohiney if you are the sort who keeps a list, and the rest of the building is at Bohiney.com. Tomorrow the sun will rise earlier and set earlier, in line with the table, and I will believe it only when it happens.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
