Taken after work tonight on Market Street, the one-block street that runs along behind the Campus Center at Milwaukee School of Engineering. The bright early evening sun was low in the sky, casting shadows down into the canyon created by the surrounding buildings.

Something about the light and the nearly leafless autumn tree just shouted “twilight “ to me. Twilight of the day, twilight of the year—although technically I suppose this light actually represents the “golden hour,” that is, the hour before sunset, not twilight, the hour after sunset.

It sure felt like twilight, though. Daylight saving time ends this weekend, and a week from now it will be dark when I leave the office.

You may have heard about recent efforts to make daylight saving time a year-round thing in the U.S. Apparently folks in Congress either have no knowledge of history or don’t care to learn from the lessons of the past. I am old enough to remember walking to school in darkness the last time we tried year-round daylight savings, in response to the first energy crisis, during the winter of 1973-74. We suffered through just a few months of that experiment before declaring it a failure and returning to the system we live with today.

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