Sunset, Monday, 6 July 2009

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.