A Fortnight of Sunlight
Twenty years ago, Peter Mayle and his wife spent a year “retiring” from their overcast British lifestyle (he had been a British Mad Man) by buying and renovating a house in Provence. He was already a writer, but his best-selling book A Year in Provence established him at a late stage in life (his 60’s) as a prominent and popular writer. I both loved the book and loved the whole romantic story of a storyteller recounting his simple trials and tribulations with the locals. He had to adapt to a new culture, a new lifestyle, a new work ethic and a new perspective and he did so with great wit and humour, as the British would say. I will add that Peter Mayle also went on to write the story that became that wonderful Russell Crowe movie A Good Year about a high-powered British banker (specifically a killer trading manager) who inherits a chateaux and vineyard in Provence and finds a way to, at first involuntarily, and then quite willingly adapt to a Provençal lifestyle that has far more love and passion than greed and power as its basis. These are triumphant stories of the better angels of man overcoming the baser instincts of the natural order.
I started writing The Old Lone Ranger in February, 2019. In the ensuing fifteen months (some 455 days) I have published 595 (including this one) stories for a total word count of about 750,000 words, which equates to about eight average length novels. I have missed only one or two days without publishing or scheduling the posting of a story and they have almost all been original works, written contemporaneously with their publication (probably less than ten exceptions where I have used older stories or stories from others). I love to write and I am grateful to my youngest son, Thomas, who encouraged me to start this blog to give an outlet to my passion. As they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will come. I was most definitely ready.
Last night I purposefully looked at my weather app to get a sense of what I thought would be a warming trend. I may not have a lot to do in this lockdown/reopening moment in America, but I do still try to plan out my days somewhat and use the weather as one small input. If I still lived in the Northeast, the weather would be a much larger component of my day planning, but out here it is less so because it doesn’t vary a whole heck of a lot as I have noted in prior stories. It may always be sunny in Philadelphia and they may say that it never rains in California, but out here on this hilltop in Escondido in northern San Diego County, its pretty nice most of the time. When I looked at the weather app I saw that the temperature was going to be 78 degrees and sunny today. Pretty normal. Then I looked out over the fifteen day forecast and saw fifteen days that were all projected to be sunny and between 71 and 85 degrees. Two of those days had the slightest hint of cloud cover, but they were otherwise all just little bright yellow suns staring at me.
That is when I went right to my writing app and penned the title to this story, A Fortnight of Sunshine. I cannot hide the fact that I was influenced in the titling and the theme by Peter Mayle. The word “fortnight” comes from the old English and Celtic languages and as best I can surmise, it had to do with the periodicity of salary payments. That probably means it derives from the influence of the Roman occupation of the British Isles since Roman soldiers were paid fortnightly and their salary comes from their payment made at that interval, oftentimes in the form of pounds of salt (hence sale or salary). It all goes back to those damn Romans or Greeks in Western Civilization.
Meanwhile, the use of the word fortnight is generally declining in everyday parlance, which may be the reason I like to bring it out and waggle it around a bit every once in a while. Consider it my feeble attempt to keep the Roman and Old English traditions alive. I no longer collect a salary per se, but fourteen or fifteen days is still a convenient timespan and I suspect that is not just me. IBM and its Weather Channel app seems to think that fifteen days is about right for fairly accurate weather prognostication. There must be some sort of Circadian rhythm to the span that makes us want to think in its terms. Its not a moon phase or tidal thing. It’s like that old Senecot advertisement for its laxative when they compare its benefits against that of prunes by saying “one too few, six too many?” So I say a week is too few and a month too many, so, hence, the fortnight. Of course I cannot ignore the handy rhyme of fortnight and sunlight. That always helps.
Here I am, then, thinking I’m Peter Mayle and writing about hoses and solar batteries at my new “retirement” home in sunny Escondido. I have my Handy Brad and my bro Jeff as the equivalent of Mayle’s Provençal characters off which he plays his witticisms. This is not done from boredom just as I’m sure Peter Mayle was anything but bored as he wrote his wonderful story of his first year in his new home. I love noticing, embellishing and recording everyday events and interactions. That is the lifeblood of storytellers. The retelling is our raison d’etre, our cause celebre, our noblesse oblige. Am I overdoing it? Probably. Do I care? Not one whit. Yesterday, my friend Steve Larsen sent me a meme about why old guys don’t get hired. An interviewer asks the old guy what his biggest weakness is. He says its his honesty. The interviewer says that he doesn’t think honesty if a weakness. The old guy says he doesn’t give a fuck what the interviewer thinks. QED (quod erat demonstrandum). Steve said the meme reminded him of me. QED.
I am blessed by a endocrine system that spits out a bunch of what I’m guessing is some form of serotonin, that monoamine neurostransmitter that has a popular image as cause of feelings of well-being. Actually, Wikipedia tells me that what it really does is “modulate cognition, reward, learning, memory, and numerous physiological processes such as vomiting and vasoconstriction”. That sounds a lot more involved and less romantic than the notion that it makes me feel happy in the morning. But today, though it may be the first day of the rest of my life, it is also the first day in a fortnight of sunshine. I, for one, plan to not waste any of that, so I’m out looking longingly at the ocean and the distant mountains (now less snow-capped than when I last noticed them). I have a BMW motorcycle out in the garage that has its registration up to date. Therefore, while Handy Brad continues to work on the stucco surface of our deck and re-caulking what needs re-caulking, I plan to hop on my motorcycle, crank up the tunes from my Bluetooth helmet and take off for the the mountains for a ride in the sun to properly begin my Fortnight of Sunlight. Rest In Peace, Peter Mayle, who died last year at the age of 79.