What I Saved in Daylight Saving Time

When you’re a kid, TIME is one of the great unchangeables of life. I was supposed to get to school by eight fifteen, and from the moment the alarm rang, that goal hung over me. My earliest humiliations involved walking into the classroom a couple of minutes late, with the other kids staring at me, and the teachers marking down T for Tardy.

So the magic of Daylight Saving Time thrilled me. Just like that, the hands of the clock flew backward. “You get an extra hour of sleep,” my mother assured me. What kid ever wanted an extra hour of sleep, though?

Here are some of the things I saved, instead:

When I was seven, I saved the colored pages of comics from the Sunday paper. My dad made a big deal out of buying the intelligent newspaper that had none of these pages. But with the extra energy of DST (yes, Daylight Saving Time), I nagged and whined and said “please Dad” until the paper that put Sports results ahead of politics, and comic pages in its middle, came home with us from the store. Also, I think, penny candy. But I did not save the candy.

At age ten, I saved a small child from walking into the road in front of a car. I can’t be sure it…