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seasonal-division day . . .
    And that reminded him—how hadn’t it occurred to him long before?—of when/where/how, as a kid, he had first been made really aware of solstices, equinoxes, and the like. The sudden recollection literally dizzied him: less than the lead-in to that afore-italicized one, but enough so that—excusing himself to skinny male undergrad in black warm-up suit on much-worn sofa just inside lounge—he sat down beside him to steady himself before climbing the stairs to Mandy’s second-floor office.
    And noticed that although the kid was perusing USA Today , the magazine he’d picked up from the cushion beside him and plopped onto his lap to make room for the couch’s new occupant was—Get outta here!—the Jehovah’s Witness illustrated monthly Watchtower . And under it (now likewise lapped), the old Everyman edition of Shakespeare’s comedies....
    “¡Jesu effing Cristo!” he’ll groan to endlessly patient Mandy over Bozzelli’s pepperoni/mushroom pizza after collecting himself and her for their lunch date. “I feel like I’m living in the kind of greenhorn novel that I might’ve perpetrated at that kid’s age if I hadn’t had my old buddy Ned Prosper to rein me in! Where are you when I need you, Nedward?”
    “Have another slice before it gets cold,” is his wife’s advice, “and tell me all about it between mouthfuls.”

    As best he could, he did, and was so possessed by the recounting that—again at her suggestion, but he needed no prodding—instead of doing whatever he’d had in mind for that afternoon, he returned to the workroom in which he’d spent another all-but-eventless morning, refilled his ever-ready Montblanc Meisterstück with Parker Quink, and ( sans vertigo this time) first-drafted the following.

SOLSTITIAL ILLUMINATION OF POST-EQUINOCTIAL VISION #1:
The Watchtower
    21 December 1936, it will have been: the depths of the Great Depression, but a frosty-bright late afternoon in tidewater Maryland. Light snow cover as afore-envisioned, but no ice on the roads, and nearly no wind. On the prickly-plush rear seat of Mr. and Mrs. Prosper’s big black LaSalle sedan with its handsome whitewall tires (including spares nestled into each front fender; no tire-chains needed today, but there’s a set in the trunk, just in case), Narrator is comfortably ensconced between, on his right, first-grade classmate/buddy Ned Prosper, and on his left Ned’s three-years-older sister Ruth. It’s a birthday-party excursion, unlike anything Narrator’s family could ever imaginably come up with: Ned having been born on the winter solstice of 1930, and Narrator on that year’s autumnal equinox three months prior, the Prospers—newly moved to Bridgetown from across the creek in Stratford—have decided to celebrate the occasion by driving over to marshy South Neck, on the Chesapeake Bay side
of Avon County, to climb the new fire-watchtower erected there by President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (special permission from the local CCC having been secured by Mr. Prosper, a Democratic county commissioner as well as principal of Stratford Junior High School), and to watch the sunset of the year’s shortest day from the windowed observation booth at the tower’s top, saluting its descent below the western horizon with mugs of thermos-bottled hot chocolate and specially-baked birthday cookies. All hands are decked out in winter togs: galoshes, scarves, lined gloves, stocking caps, sweaters, and warmest jackets. Corduroy knickers and knee-socks for the boys; woolen leggings beneath the ladies’ skirts. In the front passenger seat, trim Mrs. Prosper, an English teacher at the private Fenton School outside Stratford (which Ruthie will attend instead of the county’s public schools when she reaches ninth grade—or “First Form,” as it’s called at Fenton), keeps up a merry banter with the youngsters, in which her husband also joins. Through the half-hour cross-county drive,