Columnists
Bringing Back the Lost Months
Do you get the feeling that March, April and May are going to be lost months, in which nothing positive happened except that we all got three months older? Would you like a do-over after the coronavirus crisis has passed its peak?
I have a simple proposition for you. Since this is a leap year and we are already altering our calendars to add a February 29, why don’t we change our calendars some more and add in a version 2.0 of the months of March, April and May. We could slot them after the end of our regular May, when hopefully the curve will have been flattened and may even have been planked.
Having an extra three months on our calendars would give us time to participate properly in all these weddings and funerals that have been sitting in dry dock waiting for the contagion to abate. Same with all the concerts, literary festivals and plays we haven’t been going to see. Otherwise, we’d have to take them in at the rate of three or four a day, or practise triage on which events to attend. And just think what major league sports are faced with. The NBA and NHL are going to have to play a ton of postponed games, and that will eat into the already delayed seasons of MLB and the CFL. There will be a competition for playing space and audience attention that will leave someone a loser. Putting the lost months back on the calendar may solve the problem neatly.
The obligation to say home and vegetate, which is likely to last at least until the end of May, will leave us precious little time to plan for major summer events like Canada Day. Having March, April and May back will give us a well earned breathing period in which the contagion can abate and we can focus on getting ready for the summer season.
Note that this is not some off-the-wall time travelling proposal. The decisions we made and the actions we took during the lost months will stay with us; we will simply get the chance to add some lustre to our dull achievements for the period by doing some of the things we counted on doing, but didn’t get the chance to do.
But is adding back those three lost months even theoretically possible? We put the question to Dr. Jacob Cjisburger, Canada research chair in applied metaphysics and director of the Diameter Institute at the University of Kitchener. He was at first reluctant to speak to us, holding out for a better interview with Bob McDonald on Quirks and Quarks, but reluctantly agreed to comment to us after we promised to try to procure a Day 6 tote bag for him. He told us “What you are proposing is not impossible. It may even be theoretically possible. However, social vectors may make it impracticable. Now about that tote bag…”
The expedient of adding back our lost months has its critics. Some say this will give us November temperatures in August; but they fail to point out that it will also give us May weather in February, so it would all come out in the wash. They also say that it would be disruptive of the weekly cycle. May 31 is a Sunday; so unsurprisingly, June 1 would ordinarily fall on a Monday. If we are going to go back to March 1 at the end of May, we would have to start on a Sunday, but that would give us an extra day of rest, which is no hardship. It’s equivalent to turning our clocks back 24 hours, which means we don’t have to touch them. Nor—unlike when we switch daylight savings time on and off—will we have to worry about gaining or losing an hour’s sleep.
And lastly, some say this will put calendar manufacturers out of business: class action lawsuits will be brought to hold them accountable for printing unreliable information. Maybe those manufacturers could see themselves making a better return from getting into the personal protective equipment racket and might stop making calendars altogether, which would give the litigious the result they deserve. In any event, It’s another six weeks or so until the end of May; people will have had enough time to adapt if the change is made promptly.
If people are really intransigent about the addition of the lost months, we could strike up a committee to come up with a plan to restore balance and delete them from the calendar over some future period. But that would open the door to a discussion of whether to delete less desirable months, such as January, February and November; or to delete particular days, such as St. Patrick’s day and the Ides of March. I wouldn’t want to be on that committee: what if they wanted to eliminate my birthday?
The case for putting those three lost months back on the calendar remains overwhelming. Now if only we could impose a three-month delay on flooding season, we might be on to something really useful.
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