Missed Connections

No, not a Craiglist Personal, in this Enfranchised, we celebrate the repetitively ephemeral. Cf. Gatsby, p. 16 (in the only edition that matters: mine). "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." Think what you may of Daisy (and I know many of you do), she's a character. (In that last parenthesis, I was referring partly to my friend Michelle Michelle Miller[sic] who hates her for not trying to examine herself and partly to my co-blogger Foster who likes this book so much he named his pet lamb Effscott).

You can never truly miss the longest day, you can just have to wait for it again. Same thing with the bus, or any holiday, or the moment in a relationship when the love finally leaves it and it's over no matter how much more fighting or making up or protestations of love there may be left.

It is only mortality that may rob us of our privilege of reexperiencing the recurrent. I will most likely never see Halley's Comet. Luckily, I don't care to, either. I may get to our nations tri-centennial (I certainly hope I make it to at least the French-Indian War. For no particularly great reason...)

This year offers us many of these similarly roundly irreproducible celebrations. They include, but are not limited to:

• Guy Fawkes's Day. (1605) In England, a serious holiday celebrated with tea, more gunpowder than the man himself had, and effigies. In the US, a holiday counted down to by Anglophiles and Eccentrics. I count myself both.
  
• Einstein's annus mirabilis. 100 years ago, the funnily-haired Patent Clerk came up with the photoelectric effect, relativity, and probably some other stuff. Now, a century later, we have more confusing theoretical math and scary branches of physics with names such as Quantum Chromodynamics. Truly a great man.
  
• Johnson's Dictionary. If I ever made a Best Of list of lists of words in English in alphabetical order, this would make the top 5.
  

Make sure to celebrate them while you still can.