I have come to regard the last Saturday in October as Daylight Wasting Time, a day that I have grown to hate and dread! On the other hand, I have always loved Daylight Savings Time, from when I was a kid. I eagerly looked forward with great expectations to that Saturday, which for me marked the real beginning of spring. During my weeks of anticipation leading up to the yearly event, I made plans and considered what I would do with more daylight and more day time. And long after the “Ritual of the Changing of the Clocks,” as I had come to refer the ceremony, I reveled in all of that glorious extra sunlight – except maybe when my mother sent me off to bed with the sun still up and most of my friends, whose mothers weren't such clock-watchers, still outside playing Hide and Seek or Manhunt late into the darkness of night.
I always loved helping my mother move ahead all the clocks in the house on that Saturday night before I was sent to bed, which was an hour earlier than usual to make up for the hour of sleep my mother told me I was going to lose. And years later, when the task of keeping track of time fell to only me, I took to moving all my clocks ahead with glee on Saturday afternoon, so I might acclimate myself to the new daylight several hours earlier than the rest of the Eastern Daylight Savings Time community.
Turning the clocks back in the fall has always been painful, despite knowing I will gain one more hour of sleeping time, and only partly because it means losing some of the daylight I had grown accustomed to during the spring and summer months. I hate it more because it marks for me the onset of winter, two full months before Mother Nature's actual date. And I hate it most of all because of the turmoil the yearly “Ritual of Daylight Wasting Time” night causes me in my personal life.
On that clock changing evening I always go to bed with great trepidation, knowing I have to set my alarm clock for 2 AM, and then, when it rings, I will drag myself up and out from under the warm covers in the middle of a chilly October night to turn back one hour every single clock in my house, including my three wristwatches! Even though I have grown pretty adept over the years, this whole time-revisionist thing usually takes me about twenty minutes from start to finish before I am able to flop back into bed. Then, to make bad matters worse, by the time I am on the brink of re-sleep and about to return to a blissful REM state, the alarm on the newly reset clock goes off again at 2 AM, and I have to do the whole thing again... and then again... and then yet again, until I am exhausted. On that night I am Bill Murray trapped in a Groundhog Day nightmare of my own, subtracting an hour each time I turn the clocks back, waking to the alarm and repeating the process ad infinitum!
On the positive side, if there is a positive side to all this, one year, by the time the whole clock resetting process was completed, I subtracted so many hours and gained so much extra time that I woke up on Friday morning! Of course, when I showed up at work bright and early, I was the only one there. For everyone else it was Sunday morning.
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