60 Minutes

"Wasn't the time change last week?" comes the question once my reminder is on the board.

"Nooooooo. Did you move your clocks?"

"No."

"Then how would that work, then, exactly?"

And the students, two or three of them, asking at different times (natch) on different days, just shrug and go on, evidence, again, that life is just something that happens to them, that the world is not a place that they expect to make sense of or control. I think that explains so much.

Meanwhile I was just looking forward to that manufactured hour, claiming I'd sleep through it, though I never, ever do. It wasn't as bad as the Daylight Savings Fiasco of '98, when I squandered my year of Indiana residency (then a non-participating state) by being out of town and having to spring forward to catch a plane, damn the give-me-my-hour-back luck, but I was up stupid early this morning, which seems to defeat the purpose. Then again, Sundays are always so short.

Though I changed my watch and, of course, the electronics take care of themselves, most of the clocks spent most of the day an hour in the future. To leave them unchanged was mostly lazy, something to be done tonight before the hours and minutes start counting again tomorrow--but it's also a most satisfying mind game, this one day each year. Is it four o'clock already? No! It's only three (as if I can't tell time by football). Was I really at the grocery store that long? No! For once it's true. By now my time is beginning to catch up with me, or vice versa I suppose, and I really should make the rounds and rejoin reality. Nice while it lasted, though, the illusion of a little extra, the illusion of control.