Daylight Savings Time
Like the mass movements of the wildebeests in Africa, we will soon see the mass movements of Americans returning to some earlier time for Thanksgiving. It has been decades since I’ve made such a November drive. Today the house no longer stands, only one cousin and I still live, but I see the cars/trains/planes and know the elemental pull that cannot be ignored.
A drive through most of the night with a thermos of coffee. A stop at Stuckey’s to fill the thermos and the tank and to buy the largest box of candy as my contribution. The last miles I see kitchen and barn lights, stars fading, mountain tops visible as the eastern horizon loses intensity. I turn down the familiar driveway and into food, arms, laughter, and talk. Stories of the past, explanations of the present, hopes for next year.
Women in the kitchen, men on the porch if the weather is decent or in the garage if it isn’t, kids doing kid stuff on their own. Two tables opened to their limits, card tables for food that can’t fit anywhere else. The best dishes and silverware mixed with those brought from other kitchens.
Chairs slide out, hop forward, talk lapses. A brief prayer in Norwegian from one end of the table, one in Swedish from the other end. A huge silence before the rustle of plates, silverware, food served, and the spreading of pleasure until talk and laughter take over.
Divorces, deaths, bankruptcies lose their stings amid this gathering to celebrate another year, another recognition that we need each other. Those not present are brought into the fold by spirit and memory.
The value is not the food, not the weather, not the history of the day. It’s this group of people once again gathering as they have before and will again until there is only memory of the common experience, a dear memory these decades later. The gathering holds us with the others, it defines us, it improves us, it reminds us that we are part of something bigger and better than the individual, that we belong. Church groups, professional organizations, political parties, book clubs, musical or dance groups—we may belong for short or long times but always inhabit the group.
People attend class reunions, become part of the class of ‘63 or 2003 or some other year, return to who they were. People give donations to their universities from decades earlier, or attend games garbed in color with chants from their early 20s… and cement their place in the common. Young or old, we define ourselves by common experience, large or small.
I have no green and gold regalia greater than a coffee cup, but I join the Elderly Cheese Heads to remember a winter night in 2003 when Bret Favre threw four touchdown passes against the Raiders, winning the game for his father who had died not too many hours earlier. We may be ridiculous, yet we are bound and believe in the next Super Bowl.
We cherish those events that bring us together as a larger family, as Americans. The experiences are not necessarily positive: the atomic bombs, the death of John Lennon, 9-11, explosion of the Challenger, Katrina, Kennedy assassination. Many are: Sputnik, grainy black and white footsteps on the moon, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show: Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,” Nixon’s resignation, Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, take down this wall,” the 1986 Hands Across America, MLK’s “I Have a Dream,” the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
And the clocks we adjust twice a year. Length of daylight changes because of the earth’s orbit around the sun – we cannot ignore any scientific fact. We must remember the history: as part of 1940s war efforts, working in the hours of natural light saved resources needed for artificial light. All Americans participated, an experience that unified us just as did victory gardens and collecting tin cans.
Not just memories, this is the glue that holds us together. We need the glue; we need common experiences especially in this decade of corruption and division. Ninety-dollar checks, even five-thousand-dollar ones, will not buy what is not for sale, the strength and knowledge of the commonality, “we the people of the United States” who believe in the common good.
Marie Howard