Z! ❄️ ☀️ ZappaSol happens when the Winter Solstice (in my hemisphere) coincides with Frank Zappa’s birthday, 12/21. And that’s today.
FZ in a New Yorker illustration by João Fazenda
Winter Solstice. From NOAD:
noun solstice: the time or date (twice each year) at which the sun reaches its maximum or minimum declination, marked by the longest and shortest days (about June 21 and December 22). ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French, from Latin solstitium, from sol ‘sun’ + stit- ‘stopped, stationary’ (from the verb sistere).
This year the sun stands still for
Frank Zappa. Whose death day (12/4, in 1993) was just a little while back. But now, thanks to Kyle Wohlmut and his daily tributes to FZ at this time of the year, the greetings on FZ’s birthday included cute childhood photos, locating them in the 1940s, which made me look at the year of his birth: 1940, the year of my birth. FZ was essentially just my age (born two months after me), a fact that I had somehow missed before (Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, I knew about, now Frank Zappa too!).
Now nice of FZ to arrive, bearing with him the beginnings of the sun’s return.
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