This morning we switched back to standard time. I don’t like waiting another week to make the change — when daylight saving time ends, I’m glad for the brief two weeks of early morning light, until that too is gone, lost to the increasing hours of darkness. Changing later means less morning light. I must confess I am a lark — a naturally early riser — one of the few. This has been going on for almost as long as I can remember: when I was four years old, I would get up at 5AM to watch “Popeye” and “Mighty Mouse”.
Of course it is easier to get up early when it’s light outside — especially in the springtime. But at that time of year, I’m often up before dawn anyway; I tend to wake with the birds. Their songs pull me out of bed. Even in the fall, as the light lessens, the birds aren’t fooled. The resident cardinals started calling at their usual time this morning — several minutes before sunrise — no matter the time on the clock. They pay no attention to what silly humans do to their clocks. I sometimes envy the birds for being able to live their lives on a more natural time: wake with the dawn, go to sleep as the sun sets.
So I’m not happy with the time change happening later. I have to remind myself, though, of a time when it was much worse: when the change back to standard time didn’t happen at all. That was when Nixon decreed that daylight saving time should last year-round. I remember walking west down our street on my way to high school each weekday morning: except for a few lights along the way, it was pitch-black. The kids who went to the Catholic high school (I went to the public school) would pass me going east, on the way to their bus stop. One of them was a good friend, and he and I would say hello as we passed each other. When I told my mother about it, she thought it was very funny that we would be walking opposite directions to school in such darkness: “Like ships passing in the night,” she would laugh. I didn’t find it amusing at all — it was dangerous crossing the highway to get to school from our neighborhood in the dark. Luckily, that didn’t last long — after about a year, Congress changed the law, and daylight saving time went back to its usual schedule.
