Tradition

 

In case you didn’t notice -- hey, it could have been cloudy where you were -- the days have started getting longer. Yep, while the actual start of winter, as if winter ever follows the calendar, is not for a coupla days, the sun reached the nadir of its southerly position on Sunday and started moving north. Well, actually, the sun didn’t go anywhere, it was the Earth’s orbit that turned back in the other direction. Which is a better way of putting it since if you stand really far back, like at the edge of the universe, there ain’t really no north or south. Probably not even an up and down.

So what did you do with all the extra daylight? Musta been a good thirty seconds or so. If you weren’t watching closely, bang-zoom, it was gone in a trice. A trice is the average career length for a comedian who bets his act on saturnalia jokes. So let me skip backward and start anew.

How often do you have to do something before it becomes a tradition? Once? Twice? Thrice? More than once, I think. Over the weekend, as I did last year, I made a special trip to visit a special friend. Susan and I have known each other for almost a quarter-century. We began youthfully close and over the years were separated by miles and relationships. But recently, in our plus-forty years, as we’ve grown older and wiser, softer and brighter we’ve also grown closer.

Susan lives in Wyoming and comes to visit her mother in Chico, which is a three-hour drive but only an hour by air. So I fly up, we have lunch, and I fly back. Somehow, in just the few hours we spend together driving into to town, eating, and driving back to the airport, we reconnect and move ourselves forward a significant hitch, defying the clock and holding the sun high above the horizon.

As I flew back toward Marin, the sun was arcing down toward the coastal hills and the Pacific beyond. Many of the valleys were filled with fog. With the thick marine haze, the successive ridge lines were pastel'd in grays and blues and purples; poster-like. I picked up a decent tail wind coming home, putting a fine capper on year two of my new tradition.

It’s not about time, of course, it’s about experience. At some point you understand that progress is qualitative.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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