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Extra daylight? It's time to savor magic, memories of night, too |
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Written by Ed Hayes, McClatchy-Tribune
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Tuesday, 27 March 2007 |
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With so much extra daylight hanging around after dinner, I can forge ahead with my dream of building a cabin cruiser on our little lake.
The fellow next door was within earshot when I first made that stunning announcement, and quicker than I could wink he offered to lend a hand. Some quality neighborliness, eh?
Of course, I do think he was already cognizant that I was talking with a sarcastic tongue. Which is to say I have no intention of building a cruiser, plus I don't have much good to report in support of daylight-saving time.
Boy, it sneaked up early this year, didn't it? Man, wasn't it just Christmas?
My dad wasn't a DST fan either. "Why don't they just stop fooling around with nature?" he would say. I loved that man.
He never puttered in the garden after work. Home by 5:30, he wished to wash his hands, sit down with his wife and three sons, and relish a hearty meal.
Later, when stepping to the icebox to uncap a bottle of home brew, that was the signal he was ready to settle in for the evening, listen to the radio, and be available to all. Who needed extra daylight for that?
Here's a quick prayer that my Irish-born dad enjoyed the big, annual party upstairs on March 17 with St. Patrick himself. Wonder what the beverage of choice was.
Anyhow, there are quite a number of citizens — including a majority of minors — who celebrate the arrival of DST each year, for whatever reasons, and that's swell.
My personal preference at my age is an early dusk. It's a sort of a moody, intellectual thing with me. I also have a strong passion for rainy days.
In years gone by, like most youngsters, I tried to squeeze the last droplet of daylight from those magnificently broad, footloose months of June, July and August.
Each day during that midyear vacation was open for play, reading, chores,
contests, adventures. And enough daylight after supper for more — gab sessions and the like, and quiet games.
All the kids looked different after suppertime: sun-ripened, scrubbed clean, hair combed.
Close to 9 o'clock, darkness had the upper hand, and that's the time our parents expected my two brothers and me to be safely home. The neighborhood was fairly tucked in and locked up by then. Street lights stood like sentinels.
When kneeling at the side of my bed at night, I never felt the need to pray that an evildoer would not ever creep up the enclosed stairs and get us. First, they would have to get by Dad.
But I do recall lying in the dark attic, hearing a distant bark or beep, and the gnashing wheels of the owl streetcar up at the loop, and Dad's snoring, and at the window I waited for tomorrow, and the first clink of the milkman's bottles, clear as a church bell.
I wanted to save all my days.
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Retired Sentinel staffer Ed Hayes, 82, welcomes your views and suggestions. Write to him in care of the Orlando Sentinel, MP-72, P.O. Box 2833, Orlando, FL 32802-2833. | Only registered users can write comments.
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