Fathers Day

On Sunday we triple-celebrated.

For starters, the Summer Solstice fell on June 20 this year instead of on June 21 like it’s supposed to, so everyone in the Northern Hemisphere enjoyed more seconds of daylight Sunday than on any other day of 2021.  Mmmm boy! do we love those long lingering summer evenings, those quiet chats in the porch chairs with ice tinkling in the nightcaps while the ceiling fan spins circles overhead, and ambling down the hall to snoozeland as the day still dims from pink to pearl in the west.  

The only problem with the Summer Solstice is that it’s downhill all the way from here.  Every single day from now to December 21 will be shorter than its predecessor, and every night longer.  In city of my childhood, Philadelphia, the sun will set that day at 4:39PM, before the commuters start their crawl home with their headlights on at midafternoon for heavens sake.

Some of us descended from Northern European stock, places like England and Germany and Denmark and Norway.  Sunset in the principal cities of those countries on the Winter Solstice?  3:54PM, 3:45PM, 3:39PM, and 3:12PM.  Misery.  Our blue-painted axe-swinging forebears noticed the turn to lengthening sunlight a few days later, maybe around December 25, and sobbed for joy.  Summer is coming back, Honey, so let’s build a bonfire in the square, burn our undergarments, drink a flagon of mead, and dance until dawn.  When the Christians made it to Northern Europe they decided that December 25 must have been the day of Jesus’ birth so turned the midwinter festival into Christmas.  Fine by me.

But for now our minds are perfectly capable of ignoring the diminishing daylight hours at least until the Fall Equinox followed by HalloweenThanksgivingChristmas and the long climb back to midsummer.  The Summer Solstice.  Yahoo!  The longest day of the year.  Summer.  Is.  Here.

Some few of us also celebrated on Sunday because we happen to be fathers, or better yet grandfathers, or married to fathers, or descended from fathers.  Cultures and countries the globe around have been honoring paternity for centuries and millennia, heaven knows why, each according to local custom and each on its own idiosyncratic calendar date.  By unanimous consent the actual fathers on this blog list recommend the perfect formula for honoring Dear Old Dad: freshly squeezed orange juice, home fried potatoes with bacon, papaya, and coffee for breakfast; BLT’s and Arnold Palmers and cremesicles for lunch; and a fifth of 24-year-old single malt scotch for dinner.  In between, foot rubs, window washings, and repetitive hugs from all.  

And here’s the thing.  Really.  What could be better, happier-making, more rewarding than being a dad?  Kate and Tucker . . . Thanks!  I love you.  

Some very few of us also celebrated on Sunday because the San Francisco Giants spanked the Philadelphia Phillies at Oracle Park alongside a stretch of San Francisco Bay known as McCovey Cove, by a whopping score of eleven to two.  Home run to the promenade!  Home run to the bull pen!  Home run to left!  Bam!  Pow!  Fun!

And just the perfect first major league ballgame for grandson Jack Tucker Leary.  Yeah, we got lucky with the ticket search engine a month ago and scored five seats in the first row of the upper deck, right behind the batter’s boxes.  See that white thing right down there, Jack?  That’s home plate.  Jack got his first Giants hat, with the handsome orange SF logo stitched onto a field of black, and a shirtsleeves day under a fog-less San Francisco sky.  He also got a hot dog, funions (onion chunks they way they should be, try ‘em), popcorn, grapes, cotton candy, and a sherbet.  He learned Take Me Out to the Ballgame in the car on the way in, and stood at the seventh inning stretch to belt it out with the rest of us.

It is theoretically possible that Jack savored the Giants’ offensive fusillade less than his father and grandfather did, but who cares?  He made it happily until the middle of the eighth inning when we bolted for the parking lot.  

Alas my actual son William Tucker Hutchinson missed Jack’s baseball baptism because he lives in Portland, but he wired his sister Oracle Park beer money for the old man, as good a Father’s Day gift as one could want.  We missed you Tucker but thanks for the beer.

In scant weeks all of us Giants loyalists will join the Yankees-loving East Coast contingent of the extended Hutchinson clan in the Poconos.  Right now the Giants enjoy the best record in all of baseball, National League and American League combined.  Should they maintain their winning ways I will be tempted to taunt and gloat and heap baseball abuse on my kinfolk, and thereby risk being tied to a chair and beaten with rubber hoses.

Ahhhh . . . So what?  It’ll be worth it.

Go Giants!