“Slow” Time or “Fast” Time

Give credit where credit is due.

Matt Bullard, a teacher of government and economics at Wewahitchka High School, certainly finds timely and outside the box projects for his kids to undertake.

Cell phone use in schools, the widening of the Wetappo Bridge, undertaking live interview sessions with business owners or managers, these are the kind of projects Bullard has come up with in the past.

He is the kind of teacher any school system can not get enough of and one human being on the chart of what makes this school district as special as it is.

Say what you want about the taxes, and plenty of folks have and rightly, but this is a good school system with teachers and administrators who genuinely care about the children they will turn out into the world when their passage through the public schools is finished.

I digress.

Bullard’s latest project for his students has been a petition campaign.

Through the end of this month the students are asking folks to sign a petition that would ask the county commissioners to do what was required to make the clocks go back for everybody south of White City, or those who live in the Eastern Time Zone.

Now, the county may not have much sway.

This is one that is likely to require at least state action and maybe even federal action, but if the county is on board it figures that somebody in the state or federal delegation would be happy to carry the water of a local bill to give Gulf County a uniform time zone.

Here’s a signature, if asked, for “slow” time.

For those who have lived here a long time the difference is probably not one that especially interrupts your day.

The time difference in the county – even Beacon Hill is divided somewhere into time zones, with approximately 18 feet or so actually in Central Time – is a fact of life, as is shopping at the “Pig” or seeing a friend at the Post Office.

Everything is everything.

For some, though, this time zone thing is downright confusing.

When I was young summer was the most exciting time.

Not because of the sun or beach or chance to splash around in the water, but because it meant a trip to Iowa to visit my grandmother and in doing so traveling across that magical line that sent me back to Central Time.

My television offerings exponentially expanded as suddenly the hours of 8-9 p.m. became 7-8 p.m. The newspaper was on the front porch at an earlier hour, the comics available an hour early.

The sun seemed in perfect synch with sleep and play times, dinner arrived at an earlier hour, always a plus for one stomach.

This time zone thing was a wonder to me, made me as giddy as a visit from Santa Claus.

Most of my life, though, I suffered through “fast” time, or at least suffering in my subconscious because other than those summer trips to Iowa – and boy did I hate the years that grandma visited us – I lived in Eastern Time.

As adulthood arrived my life spun in “fast” time. As with most of us at that age, probably in more ways than one, I supposed.

But I did not venture out of the Eastern Time zone for more than a day or so until I moved to Panama City.

“Slow” time washed over me like a luxurious cool shower after a day in the summer heat.

I could read or watch a good show at night and still catch the news because it was on at – hold on – 10 p.m. I basked in Central Time.

Then I came to Port St. Joe and it was back to Eastern Time.

But I never quite understood why.

I believed the Apalachicola River the dividing line between my precious “slow” time and the dreaded “fast” time, but here was the one place on the map west of the Apalachicola River where things were “fast.”

Over the years I came to understand the impact of The St. Joe Paper Company and the trains – which came first seems a chicken-or-the-egg quandary – had on the fact that this slice of the county operated on “fast” time.

I understand The St. Joe Paper Company’s clout and their ability to have a state bill passed to change the time zone in synch with Jacksonville.

And the fact that trains had their schedules and deviating from the written numbers just to cross the river to reach Port St. Joe seemed too burdensome and costly.

These are the legends, fact or fiction, and it seems now that it hardly matters the reasons behind the time zone change and what happened in the early part of the 20^th Century.

Start with the proposition that there should be a uniform time zone in the county.

Based solely on the time saved by the elimination of all those conversations synchronizing times across zones, this proposition finds traction.

Think of the money, taxpayer and otherwise, expended on such conversations, missed meetings or missed appointments.

Think of the aggravation and, well, it could be true, heart and vessel damage done by the stress of a bifurcated county.

Make it uniform and make it “slow.”

Seems these days we could all use a deep breath.