Drinking on Borrowed Time

For his fifth birthday, in February of 1993, my older son received a watch from his grandparents. It was a black Timex with a rectangular face, digital read-out, and several complicated buttons for setting the date, time, and alarm. Waterproof, shatterproof. He wore it everywhere, including the bathtub and bed.

Andrew was a child with a precise and refined sense of time. He loved it. Clocks, hourglasses, sun dials. His favorite TV show was 60 Minutes, because it began with a wonderfully loud, ticking stopwatch that featured real moving parts.

April arrived. A Sunday, damp with a yellow-tinted sky. It was late afternoon before we realized somehow — an inconsistency: some radio announcer’s "top of the hour" newscast or a store that said it closed at 5 o’clock shuttered by 4 — it was Daylight Savings Time. We’d been lagging. I quickly prepared dinner, a ridiculous effort to keep our kids on schedule, while their father re-set all the clocks. As we sat at the table, he noticed Andrew’s watch, held out his hand, and said only, "Let me see it."

Our son unstrapped the watch and gave it over. But when his father started working the buttons, changing the time, Andrew began to scream. We tried to explain, both of us. But the facts became muddled; or maybe we never truly understood ourselves. Why did time have to shift time around? Who benefited exactly? Where was that hour we’d lost and would we ever really get it back?

Andrew ran from the table, crying, and locked himself in the bathroom. We went after him — his father, his brother, and I. "Come out," we told him. "We’ll put your watch back the way it was." But there were only hiccups and sobs and whispered words coming from the other side of the door.

"What’s he saying?" I asked Max, my younger son and Andrew’s only confidant.

Max was a sturdy, spectacled three-year-old. Sober and wise. "He says," Max told us patiently, " that he can’t come out because he’s never going to know what time it is again."

There has not been a Daylight Savings Time since that I haven’t thought of that glowing, quickly descending dusk. I’ll admit to being unsettled myself by the whimsical manipulation of time. It takes all meaning from something I typically treat as fact (it’s 6 o’clock, 7 out east) and makes my various plans and schedules seem ridiculous. Like some childish attempt to make order of the world.

Autumn’s time change is always easier, though, than the one in April. I mourn the missing hour in spring but feel relieved when it’s returned to us. Or maybe we’re only borrowing it for six months. In any case, on Sunday — that 25-hour day when the time debt was brokered or re-paid — I lit a row of candles and opened a bottle of M. Chapoutier Belleruche Côtes-Du-Rhône 2005. This is a wine as balanced as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Nearly metrical in its fruit, acid, and sugar composition, the Belleruche is elegantly structured but light in the mouth, neither too dry nor too sweet. A blend of Grenache and Syrah, it is soft and rubylike. And it is a reasonable Sunday night wine: $13 a bottle, with an alcohol content of 12.5%.

Andrew — now nearly 20 — was visiting. Six-foot-four and bearded, he remains quiet and wary, unsettled by changing clocks but comforting in his stoic resolve. To spend the extra hour with him seemed right. So I poured a couple inches of wine for each of us and together, we drank.