moon walk
by bam
“hey mom, something’s wrong. the sky is green. no, it’s orange. i have a idea. the sun is probably getting ready to come up.”
this, at half past eight on a night when, as always, the orange glow from the city lights oozes across our evening sky, blurring the edges of day and night, urban and beyond.
and so we set out, me and the boy with the tethoscope. or so he called it. actually he had emerged from the basement with the purple plastic spy binoculars, the better to lead the way. so we trudged, he and i, through the great arctic alleys, past the abominable snow shoveler, down the ice floe of a sidewalk.
“be careful,” he warned, my 5-year-old admiral byrd. “there’s ice underneath the snow. hold my hand,” he insisted, the boy with one hand still on the binoculars, peering ahead into the molasses-thick murk of the night.
“mom, why are you walking so fast,” he asked when my toes got so cold i was scrunching them under, shuffling a little more swiftly than when we’d set out, me and my arctic explorer.
we looked up, the orange glow and the snow clouds stretching a sky screen far as we could see on all sides, blocking the moon, most of the stars. we managed to pick out the north star. groped through the heavens, intent on finding the february trifecta: saturn, the ringed one; venus, the evening star; and mars, the angry planet, i tried to explain.
“why is it mad,” he asked, and i didn’t have much of an answer. maybe because it can’t find the moon either. “mars has a mad face,” he told me, making one. “earth has a gloomy face,” he added. why, i wondered out loud. “because we’re using up all the energy. and the sun is getting too close to it, so the moon is trying to get close to the sun so we don’t all fall asleep and never wake up again.”
hmm. not bad for a sky novice.
we are beginners at this, me and the boy with the purple binoculars. i know a kindergarten where the children keep a chart of the moon. the moon journal, they call it. i swooned when i heard the idea. love the notion of a child connecting the dots up above, of a child figuring how to add and subtract with crescents and quarters of the man in the moon.
of a child learning to marvel.
of a child learning how little he is.
learning to read the heavens seems like a very smart thing for a boy who is struggling to learn u, v and j. those scribblings on paper, they don’t seem to stir his sweet little soul, not yet anyway. so maybe the sparkling on high is the way to go, to entice, to engage, to draw him into the learning.
with our fingertips frozen, the tethoscope threatening to stick to his nose, we bid good night to the sky, dashed back in the house.
thawing, i grabbed for the newspaper, spread out the page that might be one of the best in the bunch: the one with the maps, and the charts and the moon. the only place in the news that reliably reports on the heavens.
look here, i showed him. here’s today and here is the moon. and then i learned something. ohhh, i began, making my mouth like a moon. the moon doesn’t rise ‘til minutes to midnight, i found out, i informed. the news, not good news at all, landed with a thud for the boy who’d set out to lock his lens on the moon.
i promised, as i tucked him in bed, i’d get the moon just for him. and so, like a card-carrying lunatic, i crawled from my bed at 2:43, crept down the stairs, walked into the arctic cold night, me and my red-plaid pajammies. i aimed and i grabbed, i got the moon, all right. but what i got was all black and blur.
undaunted, moonstruck maybe, i went back just before dawn, when the blue of the heavens is first being stirred into the black of before. there was no missing this moon, hanging up there in the limbs of the linden. there is his moon. there is your moon, too. the one shining way up above. one half of the snow moon, on its way toward the worm moon of march.
next moon walk, i teach the moon boy how the moons got their names. i’m pretty sure he’ll howl at all that.
for a heavenly guide to learning the sky, check out http://skytonight.com/observing/ataglance
pull up a chair 
Uh…you guys…wait, wait…I…uh…I want to tell you about something that happened this week. My car passed its 100,000th mile. I anticipated the milestone for sometime and found myself thinking about time, distance and life changes. A spiritualist once told me that cars represent the symbolic self and marketers may sell to the id and the ego, but while I admire fine vehicles the cars I have owned are utilitarian. Basically I look for cars that stop, go, and have a spare tire. My current vehicle is best described as a “permanent rental car.” I purchased the car new in 1998 and considered neither style, nor color, nor options package. I told the dealer the payment stream that I could make and he responded with a white mid-size four-door sedan. Like what you find on any airport’s rental car lot. “What’s a Contour?” I asked. A vanilla white Ford that I drove off the lot onward to my future.I was a different man then, a bachelor pursuing humanitarian good through finance. I was not casper milktoast; I labored for years, more than a decade, to organize, finance and fund a bank/information network granting credit based upon the ability to communicate: the fewest people have material assets but every person has the ability to communicate. Our birthright could form the basis of a system humane and pivotal. My financial logic was valid, no banker did deny, and the prospects seemed strong but with galling naivety I asked the wrong question, wondering, “Could this be done?” And as certainly as folk wisdom knows to “be careful what you ask for, you just may get it” I learned that while such a system is possible the salient question is whether the political will exists to implement such a system? I found “humanitarian finance” to be an oxymoron, and I came to question an economic system where pursuing the common good is classified by what it is not – the sector of community service, of the arts, education and culture termed “not-for-profit.” More than semantics are at play here; the economy is about ownership rather than stewardship.To the Ancient Greeks hubris was the greatest sin. I sought the brass ring, to slay the dragon and my transgressions came not by an assigned fate but rather through conscious choice. Assets far and rare, hundreds of millions of dollars, came in pursuit of the structure that I built but so too came lawyers in wing tips and lawsuits. For one year I was held in contempt of court with fines mounting daily, until in the end the Federal judge erased the ruling and its penalties were fictive, though intensely painful scarring memories. Oh, the angst and tempering pressure was slow to play out. Its half-life ripples still. The fall was sharp and wrenching but it granted me a lesson in compassion. How do we learn compassion? It’s not just an idea and it really can’t be taught. It’s not an achievement, not about doing, but a quality within that is practiced in the local and present. Humility must be renewed daily.I am a different man now, and stronger for the experience. My journey, while specific to me, I sense may be general to a wider population, my peers – male or female – raised in pursuit of opportunity, fueled with ambition and an unquestioning sense that to achieve is to be, that to “climb the mountain” is inherently good. The orthodoxy of the masculine, regardless of gender, celebrates action, too often unreflective, as heroic, meaningful and lasting. But there is an imbalance at our core.The miles also brought sterling moments, as when I drove along Lake Shore Drive one Chicago autumn evening. My passenger was a beautiful soul clad in a woman’s body and about whom I was moved to say, “It’s true that still waters run deep.” She stood beside me while my prior self was burned and reborn. I speak now of same life reincarnation. While I did the work, in so many ways she nurtured the transformation and through all the miles since she has been my daily companion. In fact, most of the time she drives.100,000 miles have measured a distance greater in life than in geography. We have moved far from the city but further still from the life lived there. As I approached the turning of the zeroes I thought on these things. I discounted the place where the event would occur, thinking mostly in symbolic terms. When it happened I was driving to work and it was an astonishing coincidence that the fifth zero fell into line exactly upon the threshold to the parking lot of my employment at a factory making durable goods. I took this not as an omen but as a cosmic joke. The universe, as it often reminds me, does have a sense of humor. Sometimes not subtle.
sometimes, the most magnanimous moment at the table comes when you pull in your chair, set your hands under your chin, and you listen intently. there is a wise man at our table, a brilliant man, a man burned and reborn. a man whose wisdom cannot help but ooze whatever the subject at hand. the man is a poet. the man is a gift in our midst.
you are one devoted mama…not only dragging yourself out of bed, but going out into the cold night. Your Linny Po is back and thinking of you!
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