Our son Quin came home for a visit last week. We hadn’t seen him in a while, but everything began in a familiar rhythm. After being greeted at the door, Quin stood in the dining room making small talk about the drive, until abruptly he moved toward the kitchen.

I smiled as I thought, “Even though he is an adult, he is still my little boy, ready to raid the refrigerator the second he comes home.”

But instead, he took an abrupt left, marched directly toward the stove, and, unasked, fixed the clock. It had been wrong by an hour since the Daylight Savings Time change.

“How can you stand looking at the wrong time?” he asked incredulously.

Instead of answering, I light-heartedly joked, “Oh, your father has been waiting for you to fix that. He thought it would give you something to do.”

“Ah, Mom? It took like 5 seconds. The instructions are right there beneath the time.” Quin shook his head.

Yup, and we didn’t want to tell him that both of us had tried to reset the clock … repeatedly. And we had read the instructions, or at least I had. Despite that, neither of us had managed to change the hour.

And there it was, seemingly overnight we had turned into those old people, confounded by simple technology. Sure we mocked our parents for the same failures, but now here we are experiencing full-blown techno-fogeyism.

While this phenomenon is new to us, it certainly isn’t new. When Bill and I were first married, his grandmother lived around the corner. Like many elderly people living alone, she kept her television on a lot. Unlike most people though, she only watched one channel — the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). This Catholic channel started by Mother Angelica was her constant companion and the only reason for subscribing to cable TV. If something interrupted the broadcast, Bill’s grandmother was lost.

Just after dark, the phone would ring. It would be Bill’s grandmother in distress.

“Billy, I don’t know what happened. My television isn’t showing my station,” she’d begin.

With a sigh, he’d ask, “Did you change the channel?”

“No, I’d never do that.”

“I’ll be right over.”

How did this perplexing problem occur? We were never sure. Given the 24/7 religious content, demonic possession seemed out of the question. Was it possible that she created the problem as an excuse to call? You never can tell with little old ladies. They are craftier than they let on. Or was it simply that she had hit the channel button when she meant to adjust the volume? We were never sure.

Like many unsolved mysteries, this one faded from our consciousness as time passed.

But, sometimes answers reveal themselves when you are no longer asking the question. Twenty years after the phantom channel changes, I had a conversation with a former neighbor who had been a middle school-aged boy during that time. He and I were both parents by then, and we were reflecting on the lack of “free-range” kids and how few kids had the chance to explore the world unsupervised.

“Do you know what me and my buddy would do for fun?” he asked.

I braced myself. He was going to tell me, no matter my response.

“So we would wait until dark –“ This grown man giggled at the memory. “And we would go around the neighborhood until we found people watching their TVs. We had this universal remote, you see. And we would sneak up to their windows — then CHANGE THE CHANNEL! They would be so confused.”

“Did that actually work?”

“Not on everyone’s,” he admitted. “But the ones that did work, we kept hitting up. And you know what? We were never caught.”

And so, after 20 years, the mystery of the disappearing Catholic channel was solved. It wasn’t a geriatric glitch that created the problem; it only prevented Bill’s grandmother from solving it herself. The true culprit: a mischievous boy who would grow up to be an upstanding Saranac Lake citizen.

Closure to an old incident is well and good. After all, no one was harmed and it makes a good story. But, still, the real question remains: when the time changes again, who will reset our clock?