The sun makes me happy. (From happymap.com)

I arrived early for a meeting in the waning moments of the afternoon yesterday, sat myself down on a bench outside the building and watched the world of Syracuse University scurry about the quad.

It was a little after 5 p.m. The students were walking about in the sun. Out from classes. Out to dinner. Out to classes. Out.

Some two hours later, I descended the steps of Hinds Hall. I stepped out into the pitch dark of the early moments of the evening. The sun had set while I attended that meeting.

Another daily reminder of the plain daylight facts up here in the northern hemisphere. Our sun is getting ready for winter. It’s showing up later every morning and going to bed earlier every day.

The southern hemisphere is getting its turn in the sun.

When I went to Hawaii a few years ago, I listened with interest when somebody in the know — OK, it was a tour bus driver — explained how they didn’t need to change to daylight savings time and back because so close to the middle of this planet of ours, they are much closer to enjoying 12 hours of sunlight every day. The give-and-take is much less between summer and winter months.

My dear wife Karen spent a bit of her life living in Alaska. She tells me about those winter days where she had only a couple hours of daylight to get things done.

I know, it’s all about tilt, and not so much about twirl, this sunrise and sunset schedule of which I speak.

Every year, my daylight fluctuates in this same predictable pattern. And yet it never, ever fails to get my attention as I make the most of those long summer days and hunker in for my long winter nights.

I know. I’m hardly the first to ponder and wonder, lament and celebrate, this sun thing.

How about those chaps from Liverpool, John Lennon and Paul McCartney (with plenty of help from George Harrison and Ringo Starr). The Beatles loved to write and sing about that globe in the sky. “Here Comes the Sun.” “Sun King.” “I’ll Follow the Sun.”

They grew up in England, where the sun came in the summer and went in the winter. Just like around Syracuse, N.Y.