It’d Be Nice to Find a Grace Period in the Missing Hour

It may be tonight before it really hits you, when you’re driving home from work, stuck in a line of cars crawling along the freeway in unaccustomed darkness.

You arrive home to a place that’s eerily dark for so early in the evening. And you realize you’re exhausted by the time you finish dinner, though the clock tells you it’s not yet 8 p.m. You fall asleep watching television, still an hour away from the 11 o’clock news.

You’ve been zapped by the end of daylight saving time, when turning back our clocks costs us an hour of early evening sun.

The time of year when we “fall back” finally rolled in Sunday, bringing sunset on today at 5 p.m.

And while I do miss that hour of evening sun, I’m grateful for what the time change delivers one weekend each fall--a blessed extra hour of sleep.

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As a kid--growing up in the Midwest, with its seasonal vibes--I hated daylight saving time.

The October “turn back the clock” ritual portended the end of autumn and the advent of the dreary pre-winter blahs, when it was too cold, dark and gloomy to play outside evenings, even if you’d finished your dinner and your homework was done.

It was the time of year to put bikes away, but not yet time to bring out the sleds. Time to get the winter jackets out, but too soon to don mittens for snowball fights. Time to put the storm windows on, but too early to dig out those Christmas cookie recipes.

Before long true winter would arrive, and that, for me, would be a relief. Then, at least, there were snowfalls that reflected the moon, lighting up our yard and giving the streets an ethereal beauty that made it possible to imagine I was in another land. There would be frosty evenings making snow angels, and hot cocoa and a warm bath before bed.

But until then, the evenings would seem dreary and endlessly long. (This, you’ll recall, was pre-videos, computers and cable TV.)

Now, as a grown-up, I welcome this “fall back” mode. In fact, I’d been counting the days this year until it arrived.

These days, I find I need a little darkness to help shut down my busy family each night. There are too many activities to cram into too little time; we’re in constant, frantic motion each day until we fall in bed, late and exhausted, each night.

I know the downside of the early sunsets--I hate leaving work when it’s already dark, and deferring my gardening to weekend days. And it’s no coincidence that traffic snarls and fender-benders increase in the weeks after the time change.

But I see the upside too, like the early dawn. I like waking up to the sun streaming in my bedroom window, instead of groping to shut off my alarm clock when it’s still pitch-black outside.

And I feel perfectly justified hustling my kids upstairs for baths at 7 p.m. when it’s already been dark for more than two hours . . . even as they protest, “ ‘Rugrats’ hasn’t even come on yet!”

For someone like me--forced to rise early to jump-start the day--the last few weeks have been torture. Try dragging three sleepy kids out from under warm covers in the predawn chill, when you’re only half awake yourself and even the dogs--knowing sunrise equals morning--won’t budge from their spots on the bed.

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As I do every fall, I’m counting on standard time to give me a head start on the day . . . as if somehow I can make that one extra hour work for me the whole year through.

For weeks I’ve been making promises to myself: Soon I’ll be getting the kids to school on time, because we’ll have that extra hour each day. I’ll put them to bed by 8:30 every night, instead of wrestling them upstairs at 10.

But it never works out quite that way. For a day or so, we keep to my new schedule. But no matter how I try to prolong it--even keeping their bedroom clocks set to the old, later time--we always revert to our former ways.

Somehow that time we saved evaporates before the next weekend rolls around, and unbidden, our body clocks seem to reset. And despite the darkness, we still find ways to fill those evening hours.

No more roller-blading and bike riding, but we take the dogs for walks, sit in the Jacuzzi, play a board game that goes on too long. And before I know it, we’re back to late bedtimes and torturous morning reveilles. And always running late. . . .

And I realize what I really need is an actual extra hour that comes every day . . . an extra hour that my kids don’t have, that my boss doesn’t know about, that comes while the rest of the world is shut down.

Not daylight-saving maybe, but sanity-saving for sure.

* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.