We just had the shortest day(light) of the year, and not a moment too soon, say I. Winter has barely started, and I'm sick of it already. It's not so much the snow and the cold as the darkness.
Some people get SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder; I'm more liable to become CRANKED, Chronic Really Annoying Ninny, and the other words are made up, too. Seriously. You thought there was such an illness, and I was using the acronym? What was it Mr. Roark used to say? Oh yeah, got it now: brain so small if you put it in a mosquito's butt, it would roll around and make a noise like a bee-bee in a boxcar.
I'm a little short with people, testy, you might say, as the daylight disappears and that spring ahead fall back jazz didn't do much for me, and according to a person I know who says he's a farmer (he has the overalls for it), it didn't do much for him either.
So who got helped? The folks who make batteries for the smoke alarms, since the commercials for adjusting your clock always seem to suggest, while you're up on the ladder adjusting the clock, check the smoke alarm and put in fresh batteries. How about if I sell the ladder and just remember to add or subtract an hour from whatever Mickey's hands say the time is, and we'll call it even?
But forty-eight hours from now, with living rooms across the country knee deep in ripped wrapping paper (the ultimate consumable? Sure gets close if it's not), almost imperceptibly the days will continue to slowly lengthen, a few moments at a time to start as we begin the steady climb back towards the light, even if the winter weather isn't prepared to relent or release.
As a matter of fact, we tend to have the worst of the winter after the shortest day is past, so perhaps it's something more than only the darkness that's troubling. Maybe it's the wanting what we can't have or the not needing what we do have, or worst of all, not being able to tell the difference.
-bill kenny
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