The Winter Solstice, 2010

For crazies such as I am, tonight has to be a special one; it is the Winter Solstice, it is a full moon, and there is a total lunar eclipse.  Of course, a total lunar eclipse requires a full moon, but the coincidence of all three is a rare event; it is about 400 years since the last triple conjunction occurred.  Unfortunately for me, on the eastern seaboard of the United States, the eclipse is a middle of the night affair and I am not sure that I will be able to stay awake long enough.  Just now, about midnight, I went outside to look at the moon and perhaps there was a suspicion of a darkening as she was entering the Earth’s penumbra, but nothing certain.  And to make it difficult, the moon was at the zenith and to look at it gave one a severe pain in the neck.  Perhaps if I keep writing I shall have the opportunity of seeing more of this once in a half-millennium phenomenon.

The other news is that I am now residing in Sarasota, Florida and I have been here for about three weeks.  I did the famous three-day drive from Ohio on the days after the Thanksgiving holiday; it was long and uneventful and perhaps surpassingly boring.  The only billboards that I found interesting or provocative were in Georgia and Florida-aka the Bible Belt.  These told us that at 18 days (I think) after conception the baby heart is beating.  The unstated implication was that to perform an abortion on such a fetus was akin, nay the same as, a murderous act.  Well, who knows, but what is surely apparent to anyone who thinks about it, an 18 day fetus has no chance of surviving outside the womb and thus a beating heart is only a beating heart and it is merely a precursor to the development of a child.  Just another example of  how some of our fellow men know so much better than the rest of us and gladly pay money (collected from us, no doubt) to shove their mores down our throats.

So now I am living in Sarasota, a small town on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Tampa.  Sarasota is a rich town; the automobiles on the streets are Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Lexus, Infinity, and so on-very few jalopies. It is clean and well-cared for and I love it.  The one thing that irks me is The Statue-as I think of it.  Down by the waterfront at the marina there is some greensward, on which the city fathers, I presume, arrange for various pieces of art to be placed. All well and good, and there have been some interesting giant pieces displayed there, but for a couple of years now The Statue has been in a prominent position in that vicinity.  Maybe some of you are advanced in years enough to remember a photograph in a 1945 magazine (perhaps Life).  This iconic picture showed a sailor kissing a young lady in the VE/VJ celebrations in Times Square, New York.  Well, some crazy sculptor has created a super-life-sized statue of the two of them, perhaps 15 feet high, in their seminal clinch.  And there it sits in all its ridiculousness in this prominent place on the Sarasota waterfront; not at all to my taste.  Nobody and nothing is perfect, so they say.

Yet again I find myself at a place where a great body of water encounters land; Sarasota is on the mainland but just offshore are islands that they call Keys, and between the Keys and Sarasota is the inland waterway, and beyond the Keys is the Gulf proper.  About five minutes drive from where I live is the beach at Lido Key, a beach that is not sandy but is made of crushed seashells-white and quite spectacular; it is a good place to go for an exercise walk in the early morning.  The funny thing is that as you walk to the west you come across a patch of beach where there are hundreds of sea birds of different kinds, all standing in close proximity.  I have not yet figured out why they stand there and nowhere else on the beach, but I intend to find out.

It is now 1:15 AM EST and I have been out into the night and note that the eastern edge of the moon is decidedly perturbed, so the eclipse is in progress. But, dear friends, the night is overtaking me and I must forgo my visitations with the moon and indeed with you, so until the next time-adieu!