The Lounge: Feelings About the Time Change

November 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm (By Amba)

It’s always a big deal when Daylight Saving ends—a kind of artificial, ritual kick in the pants accelerating the season change. Our unheralded modern version of the Day of the Dead.  Naturally, I’m ambivalent about it. :) Part of me wishes they’d never started with this Daylight Saving crap in the first place. Part of me dreads and enjoys the jolt.  I’m surprised to discover that in a way I like “fall back” better than “spring forward.”  I like the cushy extra hour, and I like the prod to withdraw indoors and get convivial and contemplative earlier, the warning to bar the door because here comes the dark and cold.  In the spring, you get robbed of an hour, robbed of the early mornings, and you (or I) generally feel rousted out of hibernation too rudely.

Yesterday evening when dusk fell between 4:30 and 5 I was walking into the midtown city from the river with a friend.  The sky behind the buildings turned dove color, stone buildings were a bloodless pale red, and glass buildings catching the western sky were silver or pale silk green.  (For the initiated, kind of like those evenings on Fort Myers Beach when the Gulf of Mexico is pale green and the sky is deep purple.)  Japanese robe colors.  Stray marathon survivors hobbled here and there in bare legs and Thinsulate blankets; only the one with a completion medal, a woman, wasn’t limping. I looked up at the glass towers—luxury river view condos, no doubt—and part of my mind went “I wonder if they’re fully occupied in this economy” and another part went, “I need to feel awe.”