Standard Time—Sort of

We welcomed the return of standard time this past weekend. It is dark now for the evening commute, evening news, dinner, and homework. At the other end, it will be light once more for people getting up by 6:00 a.m. until early sunrise finally sinks below the horizon sometime in December.

I find the darkness this time of year comforting. It transports me to my starting-out days in New York City, surrounded by city lights, which have always stimulated the world’s imagination. Cities may snarl at you nine to five, but they smile at night, pressing the hustle and bustle into something that eventually sparkles. I remember standing in the doorway (as close as I ever got to the inside of his office) of the creative director of the ad agency where I worked, on the fringe of a group of senior colleagues looking approvingly at print ads in the immaculately white office—white walls and furniture (the Director’s thing, obviously)—with the glittering darkness outside framed by the windows. It was quitting time. The work was good, the client happy, and the mood jolly.

It left a mark. I am still enchanted by the same frames of darkness outside while sitting inside next to a warm wood stove with the evening ahead of me. It is a different feeling than I experience during daylight savings time because, in the summer, once driven indoors by nightfall, not enough day remains to stoke the same amount of contentment—most of which I will have spent outdoors, anyway.

Of course, “standard time” is a misnomer. Time is far from standard around the world. China, you may know, has only one time zone across a country that could accommodate five! In its westernmost parts, sunrise will eventually near 10:00 a.m. before heading the other way. At the poles, where the lines of longitude converge, every time zone is represented, which is incongruous with the fact that the sun at each pole, north and south, rises and sets only twice a year. Accordingly, life near the poles more-or-less dispenses with time. The time just is. Australia, on the other hand, decided on six time zones, two of them conforming to daylight savings time, the other four, not, and three of them choosing to further adjust the clocks relative to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)—formerly, Greenwich Mean—by thirty and forty-five minutes. In summer, when it is 11:00 a.m. in Sydney, it is 10:00 a.m. in Brisbane, which is east of it—like having it 11:00 in Chicago, when it is 10:00 here. I love the Australians. Always ready to save the important questions for when they’re having a good kegger. I also love the Nepalese because in Katmandu right now is 12:42 a.m. against my 2:57 p.m. Nepal is another one that has a forty-five-minute offset from UTC.

Navigation came early to the world, and sailors developed the method of counting knots, uniformly tied in a line that trailed behind the boat, to measure speed. In this country, at least, it was the railroads that created the need for a uniform understanding of time to avoid having trains collide on the track. But at the end of the day, time, as measured by clocks, is a human fabrication, useful for scheduling arrivals and departures. We don’t need it to tell us when to sleep or wake, or eat, or get the crops in, or take the dock out.

That said, our dog Huckleberry is punctilious. At 6:00 a.m. he wants breakfast. At 8:00 a.m., his morning walk. After lunch, he expects to follow me to the studio where he can lie in the sun that comes through the sliding doors until 5:30 when it is time for dinner. Pencils down. Chop, chop. My wife says he has become a total “stress case.” Released into the wild, I wonder how he would explain his former life to the coyotes he fell in with: “At 6:00 it’s breakfast, at 8:00, we walk . . .”

“Oh, wow, dude, how did you manage to keep it together?”

How indeed.

Published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, November 4, 2025