A Blue Heron

A Great Blue Heron settled on a log across the lake this morning at 6:45. Of course, yesterday’s clock would have read 7:45. Most likely no matter to the heron just as of little matter to my dog. Each morning Max and I walk just before sunrise, weather permitting, hours and days be hanged.

I suspect for many tomorrow morning will be the lurch in time that matters more. A kind of stealing of time when lives are more likely to be scheduled—school or jobs for my neighbors. That stolen hour will rise to bite next March as clocks are set forward.

Not sure how much clock setting is done these days—an exercise ever quainter by the minute. But, a lot of folks will register that difference as drastic. To many the weekend whipsaw of changing sleep hours drums in this point over and over and over again. As new parents understand. Very much so, I suppose.

An odd human construct, our time measurements. Anyone who has flown west multiple time zones by jet understands the oddness of landing somewhere five hours away within three hours plus local arrival time. For me, the most unnatural sense of moving through time—and space—came by flying east from Bangkok to Los Angeles and so experiencing two sunrises and crashing—metaphorically—into the same day I left behind.

Perhaps our thinking time a commodity tinkers too much with internal clocks. Medical experts seem to have much to say on the issue. More crassly, the notion that time is money underscores the point.

Established in 1883, our four standard time zones here in the US smoothed out an intricate system of train timetables as our railroads reached from sea to sometimes shining sea. The transcontinental system was completed in 1869, so for more than a dozen years town by town, minute by minute, precise arithmetic was of the essence to monitor trains coming and going.

California became a state in 1845—I had to check this date as well. But if no one could get there with any kind of speed then, I guess no one cared too much about the exact time of day relative to the Atlantic side. Except for a job interview perhaps. After all, time is money, some say.

Oh, the heron? Flew off—let me be deliberately imprecise—shortly before seven.