Tonight is St. John’s Eve. If that means anything to you, it could be because
you live or have lived in Ireland. This is the night when the environmental
authorities apparently turn a blind eye to people burning their accumulated
rubbish in the late hours of the dying light. The more common name for the day
here is Bonfire Night.
Depending on how the days fall in any particular year, St. John’s Eve comes one
or two or three days after the Summer Solstice, that is, when the earth is
positioned to provide the shortest nights and longest days in the Northern
Hemisphere. The farther north you go, the shorter the night, and Ireland is
pretty far north. Straddling the 53rd Parallel, it is at about the distance from
the equator as Kazakhstan; Inner Mongolia; Russia’s Sakhalin Island; Alaska’s
Attu, Kagamil and Umnak islands; Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg; Newfoundland and
Labrador. This time of year you can see light bleeding over the western horizon
until around 1 a.m.
Just as Christmas season here causes one to feel in one’s bones the planet’s
passing through the dark extreme of its annual journey, St. John’s Eve marks the
opposite brightly-lit passage. Well, up to the point. Interestingly, in my
eighteen years in this location, I have noted the weather invariably
deteriorates around this time. The summer sky becomes obscured by clouds. It’s
as though this island has some allergy to bright sunlight and protects itself by
covering up.
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” That quote has
been attributed to Mark Twain, but I don’t know if it has ever been verified.
Like many apocryphal quotes attributed to Churchill, it has variations. The one
I know best substitutes Seattle for San Francisco. It has also been said about
Alaska. Whoever said it, they could have easily said it about Ireland. We spent
six months after our marriage in County Kerry. Many were the days we gazed out
at lashing rain from waves of Atlantic weather fronts and made plans for “when
summer comes.” Sometime in August I realized we were still saying “when summer
comes.”
Summer hasn’t been too bad this year, but true to form we have been getting
those Atlantic fronts lately with their wind and rain. It hasn’t been too cold
where we are, but I imagine the wind chill is noticeable enough on the Connemara
coast.
It is an apt time to be working on the final drafts of my next book. The first
three chapters are set near the Galway coast on St. John’s Eve in the year 1993.
When I first realized there would be more than one novel narrated by my
character Dallas Green, I set a couple of ground rules for him. One was that he
would go nowhere near Seattle—even if he would sometimes talk about it. The
other was that he would never go to Ireland. Some readers were looking hard
enough to find parallels between his life and mine, and I wanted to avoid some
of the more obvious possible ones. In the end, the second rule was made to be
broken. The lure of depicting his observations and impressions of this place was
irresistible. Also, when I write about the Irish, it really annoys my wife, and
that’s always worth doing. Only eight of the thirty-five chapters are set in
Ireland. The rest of the book sees our hero in California, South America and
other European countries, jumping back and forth in time.
Will I be guilty of overlaying this country with my own sentimental gauze, as
many others have done? Will I trade in the clichés that so many Irish people
love to complain about? Will my friends and neighbors find the Galway characters
inauthentic?
I won’t lie awake all night worrying about it. These days, the nights are short
enough anyway.
Books available for purchase at Afranor Books on Bookshop.org and from Amazon and other major online booksellers
(If you are viewing this on a phone, you can see many more links to sellers by switching to this site's desktop version)
My Books
“I actually could not put the book down. It is well written and kept my interest. I want more from this author.”
Reader review of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead on Amazon.com
All books available in paperback from Afranor Books on Bookshop.org.