A Few Thoughts

I’ve not been writing a lot of late — mostly, just this column. The best of writing days are dark and wet, when I’m glad to be inside and gladder still to have something to do that I love to do. But now, the long light of the season demands to be used. Lingering day calls, “Don’t just sit there. Do something!” Not that writing is not doing something. It surely is, but a window in my writing room frames a green hodgepodge of trees, a wild bit of lawn that needs taming, wilder roses, blooming dewberry vines, the beginning of a trail to the river lined with blood-orange honeysuckle clusters, and a pile of cardboard that needs to be recycled. I can’t see my eternal house project from here, but I surely feel its presence.

It all calls to me. “Come outside. Go for a walk. Work on the house. Mow the lawn.” The recycling can wait, but if I don’t mow the lawn soon, I won’t be able to find it to recycle.

Today, spring is waning spectacularly and summer waits to pounce, but by the time you read this, the solstice will be passed. Past or not, the solstice is a precision celestial event defined by culture in an arbitrary manner. If we were to give up our version of time and skip leap years, the precise moment of the solstice would move backward — occur earlier — on our unadjusted calendar at a rate of about 6 hours per solar cycle. Our rotation around the sun takes just a bit more than 365 days, so the world loses 24 of our sort of arbitrary hours to the universe every four years. Modern humans, genii that we are, figured out how to get them back. We gave ourselves an extra day to catch up, or more accurately, wait up. (Don’t think about this too much. It’ll make your head hurt.)

Less-than-modern humans don’t spend a lot of time worrying about how many days there are in a solar cycle. But they know when the Solstice is and what it means in their cycles.

Random related question: Why is Leap Day in February? Why not add a day to June, when the weather is a hell of a lot better than February’s almost anywhere above the 30th Parallel. February un-Leap-Dayed is also a nearly perfect month — four weeks and no extra days. March follows it exactly for much of the way to April, which is cool, especially if a Friday the 13th is involved. But every four years, Leap Day comes along and screws things up.

Of course, with no Leap Day, the Solstice would be in February about 8,500 years into the future. At some point, the Solstice and Valentine’s could be on the same day. Party Central!

Why do I know this? I’m a curious sort (smart-ass friends can keep your comments to yourself) and I like learning new stuff, though I can go for weeks sometimes without remembering that. Life and stuff I already know about gets in the way. But there’s always something new (to me) if I go looking.

One place I go looking is the American Heritage Dictionary (AMH). I’ve been reading it word-by-word since 1996, it sometimes feels like, but really, only for two-point-something years — I can’t remember when I started. It’s a source of many interesting words. It’s a Dictionary, right? To me, it’s also an inexhaustible supply of weird and wonderful ideas. Who made some of this stuff up? Medical terms and chemical compounds make me glaze over. I don’t try to comprehend them, much less pronounce them. Well, maybe if they’re less than four syllables. The occupants of Greek mythology, which is not so much about happy endings, seem to rate a lot of exposure, as do kings, queens, famous scientists, explorers, writers, and etc.

Speaking of happy endings, why did so many famous people die relatively young? And what got them? Alexander the Great didn’t see 35. This is not completely morbid interest, but one held in search of better understanding of who the less than old mortalities were.

Unless the life-defining moments of someone are exceptionally juicy (Marie Antoinette, for instance), the AMH generally just tells the dates of birth and death and something of their accomplishments. For instance: Flannery O’Connor; (1925-64), US novelist and short-story writer; full name Mary Flannery O'Connor. Her short stories are notable for their dark humor and grotesque characters.

So, what happened when she was 39? That is the question. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know. Yet. But, it’s a start; a reason to dig deeper.

Let the research begin.

I’ll keep you posted on Flannery and Alexander. And, maybe even “antiferromagnetic.”

When Sandy Compton is not golfing or skiing or working on his eternal house project, he writes this column and some pretty good books — with mostly happy endings, unlike some of his golf shots. Look for the books at your local bookstore or on amazon.com