The Moon

 

The moon through the lens of my camera in 2012

The moon is in the news currently thanks to the Artemis II launch yesterday, and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. This is nothing new, really, since the moon has always been a bit of an obsession with me, starting even before the Apollo 11 moon landing that occurred when I was five, but it was certainly amplified and intensified by that event.

That moment from the summer of ’69 has always been seared in my memory like it was yesterday, Bryan Adams notwithstanding. We were up at Talahi at Lake Geneva with friends to witness this huge milestone in human history, and when the 19-inch black and white TV in the living room showed the fuzzy, snowy, slightly out-of-focus images when Armstrong finally placed his boot upon the lunar surface I raced outside to look up at the moon with my own eyes. A five-year-old’s futile attempt to leave the screen behind and witness it all in real life.

I still remember the portion of the sky that the moon occupied that evening, a large, bright sphere hanging peacefully in the night like some sort of phantasmagorical fruit ready to be harvested. And while I was unable to see the LEM or Armstrong 240,000 miles away from my distant vantagepoint from the side of the cottage that July evening, I was nonetheless filled with hope and accomplishment and awe and optimism for what the future held. And I was not alone.

My daughter Adrianna shared the same fascination with the moon, and we’d talk about it all the time during her lifetime. I’d sometimes joke when she was five or six that one day she might be living on the moon.

“No, daddy! I want to be on Earth!”

Apparently, her fascination with the moon was more akin to how one might observe a python swallowing whole a small goat: interesting, captivating, full of wonder, but best experienced at a distance.

But here’s the thing: the moon connected us when we weren’t together. During much of the year when she was with her mother in Louisville, I’d be without her in Dallas. But I could go outside and look up at the moon and tell myself that this very same moon was in Louisville. Together we could look at that bright ball of hope and feel connected and optimistic about the future under that comforting moonlight.

There may have been hundreds of miles between us, but looking up at the moon helped us forget about that physical distance. A unifying triangle would be formed, with the moon providing one vertex and the two of us comprising the remaining two vertices. A golden triangle for a golden girl. It was a bit comforting.

Things are different now, of course. As a society we slowly let the hope and optimism that the moon represented fade away. Hopefully the renewed interest will usher in some renewed optimism and hope as a species.

But for me it will never be the same. I look up at the moon now and while I’m still filled with wonder and awe, it also brings me a bit of emptiness and sadness as I realize that it is now a forever broken triangle. I think of how the hope and optimism and awe and wonder that the moon ushered in that that summer of 1969 eventually became the hope and optimism and awe and wonder I had for my Adrianna that morning in June, 1988 when she was born.

But when I look at the moon now I try to fight those thoughts, to push them out of my mind, and instead try to remember and feel the great things that both creations represent, the moon and her, and I try to allow the sadness to morph into something more akin to contentment of how glorious life can be, no matter how short it may last.