Midwinter's Night

Michael Creighton circa 1971

It is the longest night of the year,  midwinter in Australia and I wait for the sun to rise, far from the land of my ancestors.  It snowed today as I was driven up here from Sydney,  determined to be back home on my mountain to see this dawn.

It is midwinter's night in Australia but far from here it is midsummer's day.  Forty years ago for me too on this day it was midsummer.  On another mountain top, in another time and another place. It was June 21, 1971 and I was on the Spanish island of Ibiza.   Not yet twenty years old I danced on that day with the last of the hippies at the end of their long trail, dancing in the dawn amongst the ruins of a temple to a god whose name I never knew.

And I thought on that day of another midsummer's day; a day of which my father had spoken often - June 21, 1921. The day on which the man whose name I bear had died, his plane smashed into the sands of the Egyptian desert as the sun rose above the pyramids. They buried him at Heliopolis, ancient city of the sun.  Each year for many years now on this day I have thought for a moment about that young man, Michael Coombs; and I, like my father before me, have shed a tear or two.  And then the sun rises and the seasons roll on.