We’re about to do it again.  Next week, we return our clocks to standard time.  Next week, the prodigal hour - those sixty minutes that left hearth and home last spring, not to be heard from for six long months - comes slinking back.  And, judging on past performance, we will once again welcome it, throwing open wide the schedules of our lives and taking it in, never asking where this hour has been or what in the world it’s been doing.

Daylight saving time is not a new idea.  Ben Franklin suggested it in 1784, but Congress, moving with all deliberate slowness, didn’t get around to passing the Uniform Time Act until 1966.  Before that, hours came and went pretty much as they pleased, except during wartime when the whole country was on daylight time year-round for three and a half years.  We did that again during the ‘70's “energy crisis.”  Otherwise, after World War II, most cities switched to daylight time every summer, sending that extra hour on vacation to the farm belt, which tended to remain on standard time.

Things did get a little confusing, hours seeming to depart and reappear at whim.  One summer, Michigan’s state liquor stores closed on daylight time, but the bars nabbed an extra hour of business by remaining on standard time.  Some areas of Montana were on daylight time when the fishing licenses being issued to vacationing anglers required them to observe standard time, and for several summers, half of Barnesville in southeastern Ohio was on daylight time, the other half on standard.

Now, if nothing else, we do have predictability.  At least for the most part.  Indiana has finally capitulated, but Hawaii persists in keeping standard time year-round.  So, too, Arizona.  The Navajo Nation, straddling that state and its neighbor, casts its lot with New Mexico and observes daylight time.  Which means if you don’t watch the clock carefully, you could go hungry because the Holiday Inn in Chinle stopped serving dinner an hour ago.  It’s not like there are a lot of options out there.

Elsewhere, during the wee hours of the first Sunday in April, while anyone sensible is asleep, an hour quietly slips away.  And we all wake up sixty minutes behind schedule.  Then at a similarly ungodly moment on the last Sunday in October, that hour comes sneaking home, confident that we will take it back.

Why do we do this?  Influenza, potholes and income tax forms come back every year, proof enough that dependability alone does not equal desirability.  We have no idea where this hour has been or what kind of company it’s been keeping.  Exactly where did it while away the summer when we were sweating in Cleveland?  Probably someplace lovely like Martha’s Vineyard or the Cape, and not once did it send a postcard.  But here it is again, and since we’ve no idea what else to do with it, odds are we’ll take it back.

Ben Franklin, who seems to have started this whole business and therefore should know better, wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac, “Lost time is never regained.”  Ha!  Old Ben should have hung around until the last Sunday in October.