Right there! The moon!
And, right above it, Mars.
Right over my head. Right over your head.
Right over your head, person driving that car! Right over your heads, people who just rode by on the train! Right over your head, person walking your dog! And the dog’s head, too!
And right over my grandparent’s heads and right over the heads of every human to ever walk the earth. And all the other animals, too, the hedgehogs to the dinosaurs. Rising and setting, waxing and waning, right over our heads.
Photo: Helen Fields, Tuesday night
Yes—wasn’t it beautiful? Mars is so bright in its close passage by the Earth that even a Full Moon doesn’t obscure it. The wonders to be seen if we’ll only look up… Thanks, Helen, for looking up!
My father was a social worker. He grew up in San Francisco and was happy to return there when he did his residency in the 1950s. He worked as a counselor for the YMCA. The SF chapter has a wonderful summer camp, Jones Gulch, in the coastal mountains on the Pennisula near La Honda. He would organize kids to come to the camp from the inner city in SF, some from the Tenderloin and Western Addition. He did not believe it at first, but a few kids had never seen the Moon. Growing up in the City neighborhoods with tall buildings, lots of clouds, street lights, and smoke, the Moon was hidden from their attention.
I am charmed by the thought that as I look at the Moon, there are also hundreds of thousands, or millions of other people, also gazing up at the same moment, probably feeling what this wonderful short essay is saying. You never just sort of see the Moon – it suddenly grabs your full attention as if you had rarely seen it before. But to have never seen the Moon, that is a tragedy.