Monthly Archives: May 2017

Kissing The Moon

[Source: Google search.]

So, there is a story.  It goes something like this:

A certain Chinese poet, Li Po, was said to have tried to kiss the reflection of the moon from his boat.  He leaned to plant the kiss…fell overboard  and drowned.  What is the moral of the story?

I am fascinated by the moon.  The werewolves, in legend, were dictated by the full moon.  The moon’s 28 day cycle has been linked with the monthly cycle  of a woman.

The moon.

I may have had my first kiss on a night of the Full Moon. I just don’t remember…I was moon struck. I walked home from a date one night when I was in high school.  My readers will know who the girl was.  I stepped into the playground of the elementary school where I attended for eight years.  It was a Catholic school.  There was a cross on the peak of the ‘tower’…I don’t know what else to call it.  I aligned the cross with the full moon that was rising over the Susquehanna River.  I looked across the street where, earlier, I had been sitting with my girlfriend on a stone bench…still there along Front Street…watching the moon rise over the ripples of the slow-moving river.

But, after my session with the moon and the cross, I walked home strangely altered…how? I can not say, but the experience stays with me.

Did we really walk on the moon?  I gaze at it often and wonder how, when a laptop crashes, we mustered the technology to go all the way there and come back…a dozen times.

As a science teacher,  I once had a plexiglass disk with a moon rock in my hands.  It was unreal.

I used to talk to my fading sweetheart, when I was in college, from a pay phone…I could see the moon through the glass…I asked her if she would look out of her window, 1,200 miles away to see the same moon.

The same moon that shed it’s light on all of history.

So, what is the real story I’m trying to tell?  I’m not sure, I guess it’s about dreaming, night and desiring something that may be the last fatal desire.

Don’t try to kiss the moon…kiss the one you love…or love the one you’re with.

The moon.

[A Full Moon in Paris. My photograph.]

May Day, 2017: Take the Long Way Home

[Photo source: Me]

So, here I am looking at the new page of my really cool calendar.  It’s May.  Most people will think of flowers and perhaps rising waters.  I used to think of crocus.  That’s when my mother always said spring was here.

“The crocus are up beneath the evergreens,” she would say….for so many years….until she passed away on a beautiful Easter Sunday morning.

It’s also my 24th wedding anniversary.

But, I look toward the end of the May calendar and I see the last date: 31. That’s when I will turn 70 years old!  I try to get my mind around that fact, but I realize that I’m not ready.  I’m not ready to be or feel that old. Where did the decades go?  Who was I as 36?  47?  Who took the pictures?  Am I in anyone’s album?

I know what many will say: “You’re as old as you feel, etc…”  But that’s not the way I see it or feel it.
I have a delightful daughter,Erin, whose life is full with a fantastic husband and an awesome son, Elias.  She is turning 45 years old.  Where did the years go?

I have a son, Brian, who will turn thirty in mid-July.  Where did the years go?

See the calendar photo above? Did I ever pull back the curtain for anyone? I don’t think I did.  I spent a career teaching…but did I make any difference? I’ll never know.

There is a vase of lilacs just behind this laptop screen.  Mariam bought them today.  I can smell that special scent.  It reminds me of the giant lilac bush that grew just behind my childhood home.  So many memories from a fragrance…

I sometimes feel like I’m 18 again when I think of past girlfriends.  Many probably forgot my name over the years.  But, I know that all the young women I meet see me as their grandfather.  That is not good for the male ego of any age.

Thank the stars that I met a woman who is older than me, looks younger than me and has more energy than me and is a hell of a lot smarter than me.

Mariam.  You took a chance on me…like the ABBA song.

I just wish I had some creative energy…to write more and make her and my children proud of me.

I guess that’s what life is all about…finding a partner who shares the same values.

I did.

But, that doesn’t make me fear my turning 70 any easier.

[Me?]

[Illustration: Journey of Life: Constable]