This thing wears the living daylights out of me.

© Celine Sparks, 2023

Cheesecake with the accent on the cake part. VIP box seats at the Iron Bowl. Shoes that look good, and feel better than they look. These would be custom-ordered birthday gifts if, you know, you could custom order your gifts.

What I got for my birthday was an extra hour of sleep. I’ll take it! I couldn’t have come up with a gift I would love more. And so, thank you to the Time Police of the United States. I was deeply grateful to bask in another hour of unconsciousness labeled as rolling off Daylight Savings Time.

But it turned out to be just a big, practical joke. It’s a hoax. You can’t save daylight. It won’t fit in a jar. You can’t shut it up in a drawer with socks and dingy birthday cards. It just comes and goes because, you know, the earth is rotating on an invisible axis, represented by a pencil and a playground ball in the fifth grade. And what we got from that was days are shorter in the winter, and that you shouldn’t use a sharpened pencil with an overinflated playground ball.

What they hand you, wrapped up in an-extra-hour-for-you paper, turns out to be, when fully exposed, an hour stolen from you. You first start noticing this at church, when there’s four-part harmony going on in worship, and it’s not from the singing. It’s from everyone’s stomach growling in different keys because the TPUS (Time Police of the United States) forgot to inform the stomach that it should not feel hungry until an hour later than it usually does.

As the day goes on, you realize that an hour has slipped away from you, dusk is settling in, and it’s completely dark about the time you get the lunch plates cleared from the table. Was this supposed to be a good thing that the TPUS came up with? Because, I mean, I’ve been known to overextend myself, and pack more things into the hours I have in a day than there are hours. It’s like trying to fit Massachusetts into a Pringles can. But while I can double up my schedule, rearrange it, stretch it, and put it in yoga pants, I’ve never been able to just take an hour out of it. TPUS can.

And here I am at what feels like midnight, staring at the clock which tells me, with a straight face, it’s not quite legally bedtime yet. I mean, it’s not that I feel like I’ve been run over by a tour bus, because when that happens, it ends, right? You get run over, and then you either die or scrape yourself off the pavement.

But when this time change thing happens, it’s more like you wish the bus would just finish running over you. It’s like jet lag, except without getting to spend 7 days and 6 nights in a beautiful country.

Instead, you spend 7 days saying, “Is it bedtime yet?”, and 6 nights worrying that the sun is going to come peeking through the blinds before you can get a restraining order.

Well, it happens every fall, and we’ll survive it. We’ll get used to it eventually, and just about the time we do, we’ll start hearing the podcasts say, “Don’t forget to set your clocks forward an hour at 2 a.m on Sunday,” as if we are going to be coherent enough to even get up and go the right direction to the bathroom at that hour. It’s a wonder we don’t have people more than an hour off. It’s a wonder we don’t have people tuning in for the late show at 5 p.m. and eating morning pancakes at 1:42.

The spring one is worse if anything because they’re more up front with you. They flat out tell you that you’re going to lose an hour of sleep. And it, like this one, is of course on a Sunday. So sleep-deprived people are drooling through my husband’s sermon, if they even make it that far.

We used to watch from the college cafeteria window as students pranced in their “Sundays” down the sidewalk to the Henderson Church of Christ, and then, red-faced, turned around realizing they had missed the whole thing, from opening announcements to final amen. I’d pay good money for that kind of entertainment, but it was free.

I decided to surprise my mama one Sunday morning by showing up at my home congregation where she still attended. It was a surprise party alright – the kind where people are running around not sure what’s going to happen next. Elders and deacons over education were not saying, “Well, Celine, good to see you back home,” but “Celine, WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER?” The fifth and sixth graders had done every word search in the filing cabinet waiting for the teacher to show up.

Yep, my mama had forgotten about the time change. I’m glad I’ve never done that personally. And this morning, I got up with all the resolve to fight the lag, and to get back to a “normal” by staying up an extra hour tonight, even when I felt like a fat strand of weak spaghetti. You will all be happy to know that after much self-talk and determination, I hav been albe to da akj dukr amkfiofi Zzzzzzzzzz.