TheBanyanTree: About the sky over the bay area

[tobie at shpilchas.net]

Friday, September 11, 2020


Dear everyone,

	You know those old sayings about as sure as the sun will rise in the morning? There are multiple wordings for the same icon of certainty. One truly sure reliable thing in our world, more reliable than taxes (ask any CEO — ask the Republicans in the U.S. Congress who are selectively eliminating them. Ask this unprecedented president) and more reliable than death because we can predict the sun, know it's coming, exactly when and from which direction. You’re not going to get that cooperation from the crummy reaper, are you. We console our children with the sun’s faithfulness when their young lives have cheated on them: "Sweetheart, the sun will come up tomorrow and it’ll be a brand new day." We refer to the sun’s eastern rising as the unchangeable compass fixing our eternal placement: Yeah, that’ll happen when the sun rises in the west.  We’re so smug about our sun. Yes, like God is devoted for some reason to our species, so is our sun. I should also give credit to the countless deities from countless cultures who represent the sun in mythological pantheons. It’s fixed. It’s central to our primal axiom. The sun is in the heavens; all is right with the world.

	We got shaken Wednesday morning, though, when there was no sun. We were jilted. It was so disorienting! I hadn’t looked at the clock, but I knew it was the middle of the night because it was still dark outside. On the other hand, the two man crew from General Electric (Gerbiling Eccentric, Gender Ill Erectic) were down in the kitchen, masked, gloved, sprayed with mists of anti-viral assassins, fixing the (despised) double wall oven, so it had to be 8:00 a.m. at the earliest. They’d called at 7:30 to announce their imminent arrival, meaning I had to run downstairs, clear the kitchen island counter so I could arrange all the boxes of replacement parts (more parts than ovens) that have arrived for them, remove the (awful how I hate them) swiveling bar stools from around the island so the crew (two man) wouldn’t be smearing their pandemicized mitts all over them, then dash down to the basement to flip the circuit breakers and cut off the power to the ovens, run back upstairs and open the back side door so their aforementioned possibly diseased and contagious mitts wouldn’t have to handle a single doorknob. Then I had to run back up to my room to get the hell out of their way and keep an extreme anti-social distance. 

	All the while I was preparing for their arrival I was rushing past windows looking out onto a sulky expanse and when I opened the back side door the sky was dark as midnight, so some automatic involuntary regulatory circadian gears clicked into corresponding position to force the gradation of hues in the sky into agreement with our human measurements for the passage of time. Therefore, my harmonic resonance informed me that it wasn’t just the time of day or night I was unconsciously calibrating, but also the time of year. What season is it when it’s dark at 7:00 a.m.? What kind of dark? What color dark? So why are there still leaves on the trees? And why this death bed orange? Has my human evolutionary genome permanently nailed the degree of the earth’s tilt toward or away from the sun that rises exactly as it should and must and has promised to rise into an unlocateable inner marriage to nature that bloomed into existence when Australopithecus was scratching for autumn grubs? The sky was wrong. The sun had not entered, stage east, in the heavens. The heavens were incorrect: a deep musty and foreboding orange. I went from window to window looking for orientation: time, direction, season, anything. Nothing. East, South, West, North the same dark disastrous orange. 

	At 10:30 a.m. it was the same. No sun. Maybe no sky, why not? As long as we’ve broken orbit and are wobbling around aimlessly in no solar system, broken with reason and physical law, why expect a sky at all? I searched the internet for an explanation, or even validation. Nothing. "Fires near me".  Nothing. "Why is the sky orange?" Nothing. "City of Berkeley — Alameda County Alerts". Nothing. A partial explanation was finally offered by our mass media smart phone thumber who reported that the mainstream media on her screen had said smoke from fires north of here were blowing down to the bay area, and were trapped in the upper atmosphere, so pollution of air quality was moderate, only some ash. But it was blotting out the sun. Too bad.

	Dark foreboding orange in the morning turned to dull ashy pink in the afternoon, acquired a yellowish mud in the late afternoon. Only at night when black descended did time, location and season fall back into place.  "How to burn time. A California lesson."



Just a report in case you heard about it and were wondering.


Tobie













"I cannot evict these thoughts from my mind."   Meyshe B. Shapiro-Nygren


Tobie Shapiro
mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net <mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net>