Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.
“What a difference a day makes.”
This line, which came to me of course because of the change from yesterday, made me think of my dad, because he used to sing the song all the time. More precisely, he’d always sing the first two lines –
What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours
– and that’s all. This of course left me in some doubt as to whether the difference a day made was good or bad. Little did I know that the difference:
Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain.
I might attribute this truncation to some sadness in Dad’s life, of which there was plenty, except many songs went on beyond their initial lines to spell out a sad tale, and he didn’t go on with those, either. For example, of “Blues in the Night” (Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer), what I always heard was:
My mama done told me
When I was in knee pants
My mama done told me, ‘Son ... ’
Really, it was 40 years before I found out what it was his mama done told him.
All I ever knew of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was:
I hate to see that evening sun go down.
And he sang that line literally hundreds of times, just out of nowhere. I think I even remember my mother singing that line, and she hardly sang at all.
(The most wonderful song along these thematic lines – my #1 diurnal tune – is “Rising Sun” by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.)
The difference a day makes is one facet of painting these sunsets – but I’m thinking that the difference it doesn’t make is at least an equally large and the more subtle part of the matter. What I notice when I see all the days arrayed is both change and the constant – something in time that doesn’t change.
This thought in turn makes me wish I could have paid more attention to both math and physics – and specifically to mathematical constants – evidently numbers that arise naturally, such as pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (well, yes, I know you knew this, but I’d totally forgotten) – and to physical constants, like gravitation or the speed of light.
I never thought any of that was very interesting, or relevant to what I was interested in. Now I think there’s a Constant embedded in the succession of days.
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William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 09:31PM | by 
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What’s Happening?
On December 11th, I picked up some effects, papers pertaining to family history, that had belonged at one time to my aunt Elizabeth Van Doren Ankers. In the top of the box was a letter from 1947, sent from the Russian sector of Berlin, concerning a German woman my father had been engaged to, at age 19, before he came home and met my mother. This is something neither I nor any of my siblings had known about. In any case, the letter informed my grandmother – Dad’s mother – of the woman’s death in a railway accident. The date of her death: December 11th.
A few days later, I signed a contract to edit and produce a book commemorating the anniversary of the founding of a local hospice. That night, we turned on the television, as we usually do – currently, having exhausted our favorite rentable series, we’re going episode by episode through a British series, Midsomer Murders, that belongs quite solidly to the second tier.
That night’s show: murders involving the founding of a hospice.
O.K., fine. A few nights later, the episode was titled “Dead in the Water,” It included several references to rats, including a dead one. Meanwhile, we had placed a vase under a leaky pipe. Surprising that nothing like this had ever happened in 15 years of living in a house so permeable to mice, but, you guessed it: that very night, a mouse ... literally ‘dead in the water’.
(We often are aware of having a mouse or two around – no rats that I know of, although for a while we suspected we were hosting a mouse we called, thanks to The Princess Bride, a ROVUS – Rodent of Very Unusual Size.)
The next one is not quite as unnerving. Last night, as the snowstorm was finally ending, our lights kept flickering – the power would go off for half a second – and we kept wondering, especially given our many power outages here in the country – Are we about to lose power? We filled more water jugs (important if you depend on a well) and made other preparations. We didn’t lose power, fortunately. And that meant we could watch another episode! This one just happened to take place at Christmastime (not a planned coincidence). It opens with folks placing Christmas lights outside ... and seeing them go out for a moment.
“Not another power cut!” they cry, before power comes back on – and someone inside the house shoots himself.
So, that’s it, up to the moment, I think. Perhaps I should be worried, except that strange synchronicities have happened to me many times before – just not quite so thick and fast. As for the connections to mortality, I ignore them – or take them simply as a sign of something serious. Something’s happening – I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is.