IT’S ABOUT TIME

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. –Will Rogers

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Daylight Saving Time arrives on March 13, when, under penalty of painful death or being forced to watch GOP debate videos every day for the rest of your life (you may find death preferable), by law you must arise at 2 a.m. to set clocks ahead one hour….or, if you don’t wish to get up at 2 a.m., you can simply stay up, which many all-night carousers among my readers do anyway (not naming names, of course, but you know who you are).

As a retiree, I have neither caroused nor set an alarm clock for years, so this presents a problem. On the one hand — which, by the way, many timepieces no longer have, much less two hands (they now have digitalis or some such new-fangled technology) — I may just ignore Big Bro and risk the consequences. On the other hand, I could drink a gallon of coffee, stay up, and when the time comes, set my clocks ahead –or is it back — one hour?

Last year, my wife reminded me of an easy way to remember which is which: in spring, spring forward; in fall, fall back….to which I said, “Fine — if it’s so easy, you get up and do it.” Unfortunately, my wife has no sense of humor and cleaned my clock. By the time I came to, it was too past two, so I thought to hell with it, and fell back to sleep. Who needs Daylight Saving Time anyway? If there must be a Saving Time, there ought to be a

To my fellow earth-and-time-sharing fellow Americans, Mexicans, Franciscans, Anglicans, Wiccans, pelicans, toucans of Cannes who can cancan as too few can….and even Republicans: as you know, these are mean times we’re in. It’s enough to drive you cuckoo. I say it’s time to tune out, take a break, and enjoy some timeless old time songs:

A note on There’ll Come A Time, played by Frank Trumbauer’s Orchestra featuring the great and legendary 1920s cornetist Bix Beiderbecke: Bix was born on this day, March 10, 1903 (less than two years after his friend, Louis Armstrong), and died tragically young of alcoholism/pneumonia at age 28. Actually, Bix Beiderbecke never died….he just ran out of time. His sound was so transcendent, remembered guitarist Eddie Condon, it hit you where you lived, “like a girl saying yes.”

I see by ye olde clock on yawnder wall that it’s past midnight. Time to Hit the Road to Dreamland* — but that’s another song for another day.

*by Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer, 1942