That Time Again

Readers of my previous blog Sundays in Spain know about my obsession with the biannual changing of the clocks. I am not so much opposed to the changing of time once in the spring and again in the fall as I am frustrated by the inability of Europe and the United States to do it at the same time each year. They both do it at 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning; it's just that the particular Sunday they choose to do it is not the same Sunday.

This year Europe changed from what I know of as "summer time" to "winter time" a week before the U.S. changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. I got my first inkling about ten days ago, when I registered in advance for a webinar that was being hosted in London this past week. The registration website had a button that I could click to find out the timing of the webinar in my local time zone. I know that there are normally five hours' difference between the U.K. and U.S. Eastern time but that the U.K. does not change to summer time (I guess Greenwich Mean Time is Greenwich Mean Time, is GMT, is GMT forever.) The website showed four hours' difference between webinar origin time and my point of reception. Oh dear! I should check that, I said to myself, but there is time to do it closer to the webinar date. I wrote it down on my calendar for the earliest possible start time.

Then later I got emails from friends in Spain and Denmark commenting on the impending dark evenings because the clocks were changing, and I knew I should be changing my mental calculation of the normal six hours' difference between Europe and here to the odd five hours' difference. I tried to explain this week to a group of people (those in my Spanish class, as it happens) that I get a little unsettled every year when this happens because it upsets the normal symmetry of my life: it is so much easier to calculate the time difference when one slides the hour hand on a primitive non-digital clock face straight across from 9:00 to 3:00, for example, or 12:00 to 6:00, or 1:00 to 7:00 than it is to move at the oblique angle that represents five hours' difference. Not to mention the change to my very deeply internalized body clock that I think adjusted to U.S. Eastern time when I was born in Ohio and, in spite of many layered adjustments through the years, still reacts to Eastern time as "real time." I don't think I was very successful at conveying this illogical but very deep-seated feeling to the other students, except for one fellow student who I believe is from Germany, who told me after the class that she understood perfectly, and shared my frustration that both continents do not change at the same time.

Happily for me, North American clocks changed from Daylight Savings to Standard time early this morning--one of us was awake to watch the time jump from 1:59 to 1:00 on the iPad. For the first time in ten years--maybe twelve--I experienced the change from EDT to EST in person. My internal clock is once again based in the right zone, and in symmetry.