“Fake time,” is how I’ve tended to refer to daylight saving time, that anachronistic act of social overengineering that the nation’s doctors tell us leads to quantifiable upticks in heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and trips to the emergency room generally, to say nothing of car crashes, compromised workplace performance and on-the-job accidents, foul moods, and brain fog.
On Sunday I was eating those words.
All that extra sunshine had my nearly-springtime sap surging. So, okay, if not in a propagation-of-the-species kind of way, then at least urging me to install new Bosch wiper blades (somehow now 20 bucks per blade) on my high schooler daughter’s 17-year-old if reliable vehicle.
Flush with confidence after that simple task I’d been putting off through long February doldrums, I went to replace a parking lamp, but, being a Mazda, and speaking of overengineering, what should’ve been another simple task required removing a fluid reservoir. It was like Tom and Ray Magliozzi’s singular complaint about Peugeots on NPR’s “Car Talk”: It wasn’t where it ought to be.
But there I was, energized by a burning orb unnaturally high in the sky late in the day, so I surveyed our humble half-acre in Noyac, half of it covered by vine-tangled woods, and remembered my late father’s answer to a wifely criticism of his older brother, 6-foot-2, played basketball at Alfred U., retired Army, a Vietnam vet who went back to school for a master’s degree and later in life became an assistant principal at a public school in Florida, a position I’ve come to understand is an enforcer: “He’s just not the kind of guy who does yard work.”
Words to live by, I’ve long thought. Still, I surprised myself with a daylight-spurred attack on a winter’s worth of tree-fall detritus scattered across the yard, singing the Vermonter Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” as I went.
Once back indoors — it’s not quite the land of the midnight sun, after all — my circulatory system yet tingled with the refreshed blood flow of a new time regime and my eyes shone bright as a coke addict’s. Even the comfort of back-to-back episodes of my favorite TV show, “Homicide: Life on the Street,” couldn’t bring me down.
I finally capped off the overlong evening around 1 a.m. by plowing through the last of a 500-page novel in, for me, record time. It was Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest,” the rest part meaning Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom — one of my literary heroes, whose cycle of books I’ve read at his approximate age in each — drops dead while playing hoops on a dusty, desolate Florida playground.
Now that brought me down.