It was the longest day of the year, a cool thing in the northern latitudes where I hang out on the planet. I tried to think how many minutes of additional daylight we were going to get each day until the Summer Solstice marked the end of the growth and began the long slide back into darkness. I appreciated the welcome feel of sunlight shining through the full green of the trees outside the office building on Glebe Road in plump prosperous Arlington.

It was close enough to five that I figured enough was enough. I shut down the computer, grabbed my briefcase and rose from the desk to walk over to the Willow Restaurant for some drinks and laughs and fine food from owner Tracy O’Grady. June is a challenging month for me. My pal Admiral Mac Showers had played a role in the naval history, and a buddy had a father who had manned the guns in the D-Day invasion of France. And a birthday for me, and Father’s Day, one that still ached a bit from the loss of mine. There was a lot to remember, and a lot to consider in that month, but at least it wasn’t dark when I eventually rolled back to my place at Big Pink, where the drinks were really cheap.

Waiting for the traffic to clear enough to scoot across Fairfax Drive and the harried commuters struggling to get to I-66 and the nightmare commute back out to Fairfax County and the ones beyond it. It had been a pleasant couple weeks as summer beckoned, weather-wise, and a welcome time to remember the epic sea confrontation against the Japanese at Midway, and the awful echoes of the bombardment of the French Coast two years later when those incredible kids waded ashore into the insistent fire of the machine guns of the Krauts in their bunkers above the beach.

I know, our self-importance about victory in Europe is a little overblown. We lost 43,000 kids in that, though the Red Army threw in a dozen million on the Eastern Front. I thought for a moment about the Dads who lost so much. Then I shrugged in the elevator on the way down to the street. We had harnessed our amazing success in the West to ensure that the Europe we had once known would stay relatively free, and we used the echo of our great military triumphs of another generation in support of the Cold War narrative. But that was one of the wars in which I played a small part, and I was on record as being in favor of victory in all of them.

I crossed the outside dining area and bounded up the three steps to the Willow’s front door. Through the glass, I could see that Jim Champagne had already taken his customary place at the Amen Corner and was sipping one of the Budweiser beers that would aid his passage to the darkness of evening. I swung the door open and slid to my place on the other side of the corner and plopped myself down with relief. Brett was bartending, a good thing, since he was an astute and considerate man behind the solid wood and already knew everything we were going to drink.

A stout vodka tonic appeared before me without the necessity of a formal request. It was a comfort to have another home in which I only had to pay for the food and alcohol.

“Yo, Jim!” I said after a first refreshing sip.

Jim looked over with his usual wry smile. He tipped his brown long-neck in welcome. I knew how this was going to play, but decided to do it anyway. “To the longest day of the year!” I said, and waved my glass at him. I knew what he would say because he did it every year.

“It isn’t any damned longer, you idiot. They are all the same.”

“Yeah,” I responded with a smile. “The solstice is the time when the sun reaches its highest or lowest point at noon, resulting in the shortest and longest days of the year.”

“Of daylight,” growled Jim. “Nothing else changes.”

I wasn’t going to challenge his views on astrophysics, and of course he was right. He even had a little diagram, since he knew this game as well as I did. He shoved across the corner of the bar and I glanced at it, aware we were hurtling in a great void at 17,000 miles an hour. Tradition is fn stuff.

“The word solstice is derived from the Latin for sun and “sisters,” which means “stand still.” They actually spoke Latin. I rest my case.”

Jim nodded and took a pull of beer from his bottle. “At the solstices, the Sun’s declination appears to “stand still”; that is, the seasonal movement of the Sun’s daily path as seen from the Willow. After this, the bar pauses at a northern limit before reversing direction.”

“That is what they do on Fairfax Drive sometimes,” I said, thinking of old friends. “I gotta pal who stayed in Detroit, and his brand of faith includes what the Old Ones thought. The change of seasons- the way the Sun God marked our growing and freezing- is worth considering.”

Jim smiled. “I looked. According to some ancient Greek calendars, the summer solstice marked the start of the New Year.”

I thought that was a splendid excuse for what we were doing. Our seasonal ritual continued. I said: “The summer solstice also used to mark the one-month countdown to the opening of the Olympic games.”

“Freakin A,” said Jim, sipping his Bud. “Kronia was a festival celebrating Cronus, the god of agriculture. That was also held around this time of the year. But remember. it isn’t a longer day. They are pretty much the same, except for a couple microseconds we would never notice.”.

I looked out the window at the sunlight still bright. “I may have another drink to celebrate my microns this evening.”

“Couldn’t hurt, could it?” We both laughed to the coming of summer, and to late daylight drinking in general. Brett was busy behind the bar, since Jon Without, John With and Gaffer Jim filled up our end of the bar. The sound of the clinking of bottles and glasses rang down the long mahogany bar, and the smells of the special were enough to awaken a ravenous hunger within. Willow had a way with that.

“Happy Fathers Day, Jim. Bless you.”

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
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