Editor's Note: Spring Forward, Fall Back

The time-pressured FM crucible revives memories of a more leisurely paced spring break. Last Friday, four friends and I disembarked in Lisbon, without any Portuguese language skills to speak of. A day later, a fine bartender murmured something about time changing for the reason his club wasn t booming. So back we wound, without even a thought. It was only two days later, when trying to catch a train to a nearby town that we noticed that all of the trains were leaving two hours later. Hmmm. And then, like the final scene in >=The Usual Suspects,<= everything came together. Why people had been eating lunch at 10 a.m., why the clocks at the diner/church/hostel had all been >=wrong,<= why McDonald s had been the only restaurant still serving at 11 p.m. Clarity. The point was that we hadn t noticed. How different would it have been if we had been at school? Or even in a familiar place? We couldn t read the various signals that told us we were a little off.

Here s a little history: No one in my family has ever been good at changing clocks. Sheer, stubborn inertia is what it is. We notice, but don t bother to take action. We adjustaif only to our laziness. When a guest wonders if >=that clock is right,<= all three of us chime >=it s a little fast/an hour/46 minutes off, we never changed it.<= And no big surprise, our VCRs are constantly blinking 12:00. Our Sisyphean car clock operates between nine and 11, treating us to an occasional accurate reading. While it seems easier to simply change our clocks, we resist.

In short, for most of my life, time-telling has been de-divinized. I find it hard to take being on time when there is usually so much variation between people s watches and clocks, often a window of up to 15 minutes. Rushing doesn t make that much sense if you are pretty much guaranteed that the time on your watch doesn t correspond exactly to your date s. If people are on time according to their own watches, does that make it O.K.? In reality though, at school, my internal clock keeps me on time. If I am ever asked what time it is, like everyone else, I can probably answer more or less correctly. In my ideal world, this wouldn t be the case. I liked having (almost) no clue.

Still, it s good to be back, if only for Fifteen Minutes.