DeMille has taken to a quick stop by the Headquarters at Socotra House in the morning to ensure that the Writer’s Section isn’t too far off the reservation in terms of tone and production. We skirted the line this week, running an Arrias piece that examined the three international situations bubbling with a half-boil. The Chairman does not think there will be an outbreak in any of the them before the holiday that marks this time of joy. The Solstice brings the welcome news that starting today, the earth’s majestic orbital motion will carry us from ‘more darkness’ to a more blessed state of ‘more light.’

The brilliant Piedmont dawn has banished the snaked gray clouds from the sky, and coats hanging inside the bunkhouse door were warmed by the gathering strength of the light and invited a brisk stroll down to the fire ring and a view of the pasture below, sleeping briefly before the turning earth awakes them in a riot of green. There was some discussion of why we had not mentioned the annual ritual conducted by Old Jim Champagne at the fabulous Willow Bar. At some point in the first round of libations, someone would exult in the occasion of the Solstice, normally with a muttered “shortest (expletive) day of the year.”

Jim would snort, and arch back on his chair to make his declaration: “The days are exactly the same length. This is only a day that marks the least sunlight. Idiot.”

Some years that would result in a response to his declaration, something prepared. Jon-Without, an engineer, might attempt to change the subject, saying something like: “The sun appears today at its most southerly position, directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn.” That would have been some Willow-style conversation altering the length of daylight issue with the geographic consequences of living in some of them.
Jim would just snort. But that is one of the hazards of city living, that the magic of the heavens is blanketed by the soaring rectangles of growth. It is one of the things we enjoy at the farm. We rise around when the sun does, and have increasingly been inclined to decline when Old Sol slips down. Seeing the shadows of the bright moon that reached full on Solstice Eve gave a strong feeling of festivity, and the pattern of the big jets above and the stars winking from behind, Orion threatening to show his starry belt over the trees is fun in the small gathering for a farewell to the day.
So, more sun, growing sunlit days await, awash in the seasonal stuff that briefly reminds us that life should be appreciated for its manifold joys and defined duration. It is an appropriate sunny morning to celebrate the incredible luck to have lived the majority of this life in the most prosperous, most free, and most luxurious age in human history.

Lucky chance. In fact, for the whole Writer’s Section it was luck, from birth to the other end of this astonishing opportunity. Every one of us some facsimile of the Stories of their parent’s generation who gave us lives of bounty. For me, Mom’s life contained some astonishing things we could not appreciate at the time we heard them. And others we could: a tale of clawing her way to college, leaving a little town on a Big River to venture to Manhattan in wartime.

The story of walking her father down to the tracks so he could join the Bonus Army protesting in Washington. Or the chance to date- and wed- a handsome young man just out of the Navy. He looked a bit like Gregory Peck at the time when the actual Gregory Peck resembled icon Gregory Peck. That was Dad, off to the Motor City with his bride to design the astonishing aerodynamic finned automobiles of the 1950s.

A tale of adventures I did not really understand until my accidental career showed me the scope of the things she experienced in that older American life. Like life on the brink of war when Grand Dad died young, and the man from the Railroad came to the little house and explained that the pension stopped with his death. Grandma, still a beauty, squaring her shoulders and going to the lumber yard to take a job in the Central Office, and marrying Evan, a nice gentleman I knew all my life as “Grandpa.”

And that sort of life, shared across a generation, let us have a life unimaginable for those who came before. And for us, in the American Century, a life filled with blessings.

– Vic

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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