The time, it is a-changing, clockwise

Glory be, we made it to March. It’s been a crazy year so far, and now, on the second day of Lent, I’m late on what I should be giving up for the next 39 days. I’m tempted to give up the spectator sport of politics. All the head-spinning malarky and finger-poking and hearsay is something Facebook is really good at, but it hasn’t done my blood pressure any favors. But try as I might, every time I turn around, it’s in my face. Pardon the pun.

As a diversion, a couple of weeks ago I was re-watching the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera and, surprisingly, one little joke stuck with me. In the scene, Groucho tries to read a contract to his brother Chico and holds the paper farther and farther away from his face. “I could read this if I had longer arms,” he quipped. “You don’t happen to have a baboon in your pocket, do you?”

He was speaking for me, I felt, and I, unfortunately, don’t have long baboon arms.

I’ve come to believe that there are not two, but three things one can’t avoid: death, taxes and … spectacles. Of course, not everyone ends up with little magnified windows on their eyes, and I never thought I would be one of those types. At least for reading.

Some people grow to a ripe old age and never have a need for spectacles, and people say, “You are lucky not to have to wear glasses.” I really can’t agree with that statement because that means the rest of us are unlucky.

My first try at specs was in 2004 when I made the three-and-a-half-hour drive down to Palomas on the Mexican border. The optometrist on the plaza behind the Pink Store tested my eyes and by the time I left a couple of hours later, I was sporting a pair of reasonably priced bifocals … which, I came to realize, I didn’t really need and which I just quit wearing after a couple of months, and going back to cheap cheaters.

Sometimes I wonder if good vision is a subjective thing. I’m reminded of something I read about Stevie Nicks, a singer in Fleetwood Mac. She was born with poor eyesight and sees the world a little fuzzy, spurning eyeglasses. She once said, “I do kind of look at the world differently because of that. I don’t see it clearly. I see it like in a dream.”

That’s all well and good for a rock star to go through life like that, but for the rest of us, well, we just want to be able to see what we’re reading.

Otherwise, it’s the month of Daylight Savings Time, St. Patrick’s Day, and the Ides of March. It’s also the month of the Oscars, where last Sunday movie people gave out trophies to other movie people in between a lot of fawning and gushing and glad-handing going on between those same movie people. Most times, I hardly ever see the movies they’re talking about, but thanks to streaming on the internet, I watched a few of the nominees - Dune Pt 2, Conclave, Nosferatu, and A Complete Unknown - all of which were OK. I particularly favored A Complete Unknown, chronicling the mushrooming career of Bob Dylan in the early to mid-1960s and the impact his poem/songs had on us of the Boomer persuasion. A good portion of the movie shows Dylan writing and singing his songs, so suffice it to say there is not a lot of action (other than him getting punched in the face by a fan’s jealous boyfriend).

With Mountain Daylight Time imminent, this tells me winter is over, and with the vernal equinox only a couple of weeks away, you can start putting out that garden and setting up that barbecue grill.

I don’t know how you feel about it, but I kind of agree with President Harry Truman, who said, “Daylight time, a monstrosity in timekeeping.” Just pick one or the other and stick with it, he said.

But that’s one thing about Harry; he was a plain-spoken man. When Roosevelt passed away in the midst of WWII, he summed up being sworn in as President thusly: “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

I guess most people remember him for the sign someone gave him for his desk that said, “The Buck Stops Here,” but not so much for what was on the other side, the side Truman always saw: “I’m from Missouri.” I remember back in 1975 the group Chicago had a song about him that goes, “America needs you, Harry Truman, Harry could you please come home…”

It’s pure nostalgia, to be sure, but it was a big hit back then.