Our clocks were set 20 minutes ahead when I was growing up. My mother didn’t want us to be late for school, for church, for doctor’s appointments, for city buses, for anything. She started this time trickery at five minutes; when we caught on she moved it up another five, and finally ended it at 20 minutes.
My sister and I looked at the clock and subtracted 20 minutes. A lot of families set their clock ahead, though I think our 20 minutes was at the extreme end of the spectrum.
It was a be-on-time era. Punctuality was highly valued. I still have an ingrained impulse to deduct 20 minutes when I look at a clock; I have to consciously turn it off, even though it’s been 60 years since I left home. I’m still stuck with the “be-on-time” mentality. That never left me. Most of the time I’m early. It goes along with the aging process. That old adage, “The early bird gets the worm,” is a credo for old coots.
If you have a party that’s scheduled it for 7 p.m. you can expect the old coots to show up at seven on the dot. The rest of your guests, the polite ones, arrive at 7:15 or later. That punctuality mentality and clocks set ahead worked for us when we were kids growing up. We didn’t have smart phones or smart watches. Our watches were dumb; they didn’t keep good time, especially when we forgot to wind them. We relied on house clocks set 20 minutes ahead.
My mother’s generation wasn’t alone in her quest to control time. Today’s population does it too, using the invention of the snooze button on alarm clocks in the late 1950’s, to gain that same 20 minutes my mother was after, but for more sleep. Off goes the alarm – you hit the snooze button and get five more minutes of sleep. You do this four times in a row. Welcome to my 20-minute world!
How about the time-shift sham we adopt by setting the clock an hour ahead every spring, to pretend the day is longer. It makes my mother’s paltry 20-minute shift look lame by comparison.
My wife Marcia and I recently crossed the Atlantic on a cruise ship from the Mediterranean Sea to Fort Lauderdale. Every night we were told to set our clocks back an hour. It was great! We got an extra hour of sleep every single night, for five nights in a row. That was the best snooze alarm ever!
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