A Good Druid Is Hard to Find

 

by Pa Rock

Time Lord

Today is the autumnal equinox, the day on which we experience as much daylight as darkness, and also the day which marks the arrival of autumn.  Some years it arrives on September 22nd and other years the season changes on the 23rd.  It would probably take a Druid to explain why - and a good Druid is hard to find.  The amount of daylight per day started decreasing in late June (when summer officially began, and it keeps shrinking until late December when we experience the shortest amount of daylight just a few days before Christmas.

Celestial events have been observed and chronicled for thousands of years, and they have provided mankind with stories and legends, rituals and traditions, religions, superstitions, holidays - and all manner of ways to segment "time" into measurable and recordable units.

Summer is gone, but it will not soon be forgotten, at least by this tired old typist.  I began the summer somewhere along Canadian Highway #1 driving westward across the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan while listening to Canadian talk radio hosts discussing the change of seasons and then harking back to how hard it is to start your car in a Canadian winter.  That discussion was enough by itself to quell my fantasy of moving to Canada during the next Trump administration.

Summer proved to be my big season of travel.  Not only did I roadtrip through Canada and on to Sandpoint, Idaho, and Salem, Oregon, I also took the train from Kansas City to Chicago where I was able to spend four nights in a classy hotel, watch a creative performance of a work that was written by my youngest son, and see much of the city through personal guided tours provided by my niece.  It was another great trip - and neither of those outings involved being herded onto an over-crowded airplane and constantly reminded that passengers are the least important component of air travel.

But that was then.

In late October I will be traveling once more, and this time it will be by air, something I had vowed never to do again.  A friend and I are flying from St. Louis to New York City via Delta, a company that stole the price of a round-trip KC-to-Boston ticket from me after a pandemic cancellation on my part.  (My friend did the reservations research and assures me we are getting the best deal on the flight, but fie on Delta anyway!)

The purpose of the trip to the Big Apple is to watch a professional workshop of the musical play (story by my son) that I saw in Chicago.  We will arrive on Wednesday morning, see Tim's work on Friday morning, and fly back to St. Louis on Saturday afternoon.  During our "free" time in New York we will attempt to see three Broadway shows, have a meal at Ellen's Stardust Diner, and I will try to connect with an old friend from my days on Okinawa who now lives and works in Brooklyn.  (Nefredia, if you are reading this, forewarned is forearmed!)

I have only been to New York City one other time.  That was in January of 2009 when I assisted a friend in sponsoring a group of college students from Kansas as they toured the Big Apple.  The friend that I traveled with then is the same lady whom I will be traveling with this time.  She has been back a couple of times since.  It was while we were on that trip in 2009 that Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had to land US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after a flock of Canadian geese got sucked into the jet's engines, shutting two of them down.  Passing boats managed to rescue all 155 people on board as they walked out onto the wing and waited for rides.

(Captain Sullenberger's plane had been flying out of LaGuardia and was headed to Charlotte, NC, and on to Seattle.   The ill-fated plane was pulled out of the river a few days later and eventually made its way to Charlotte where it now resides in the Carolinas' Aviation Museum. )

Hopefully we won't stumble into any international news stories while we are on this trip, but if we do I'll log them in the blog!

Autumn is here, the leaves are already falling, and the grass is still growing.

Happy equinox!