Here Comes the Sun

Open Door Coffee Co.; Hudson, Ohio
February 26, 2018

I've always liked that Beatles song--"Here Comes the Sun"--which the Fab Four released in September 1969, a song, I see, written by George Harrison. It's got a buoyant, hopeful sound, doesn't it? (Link to the song on YouTube.) I would turn twenty-five that fall. Would marry in December.

Early in my middle-school teaching/play directing career, we used a recording of that song--on a 33 rpm!--as a musical transition between a couple of scenes in a play I'd written with some students & produced on May 15-16, 1970, a play we called The Lewis and Clark Expedition; or, Come with Me on the Swan Boats (clever title, eh?).*

We've had lousy weather the past couple of weeks here in northeastern Ohio: rain, freezing rain, snow, rain, freezing rain, snow, rain, freezing rain, snow, rain ...  Our (new) sump pump has been chugging away (in the dry basement!) about every ten minutes, and if it could speak, it would probably say, "I quit!"

The sun peeked out briefly yesterday afternoon--as if to say "Remember me?" I almost said, "No, I don't, actually." But before I could mutter the words, Sol exited, stage right.

But this morning?!?! Bright and powerful without a cloud to sully old Sol's face. The picture above I took this morning from my wonted perch at Open Door Coffee Company. I was happy to have Sol glaring in my face, a glare muted somewhat by the sun-curtains/shades they've recently installed. (Mercy can appear in the oddest guises, eh?) (The dark circle, by the way, is not a local eclipse but a large decal featuring the shop's logo.)

So ... this morning ... my dark mood lifted a little as Apollo began his diurnal ride across the sky, as I thought about the Beatles, as I remembered wonderful times with middle-school playwrights and actors who worked so hard to bring alive something that had never lived before and would never live again except in those bright, sunlit rooms of Memory.

*The early plays I wrote with kids always had an or and a subtitle; the kids would ask me each fall, "Are we doing an Or play this year?"