|
|
|
The Newsletter >
Moonstruck: A Very Short Autobiography
May 17, 2010
For me, life has been about the moon. I was there watching when the rockets sliced through the earth’s gravity into space for the first time. I watched our engineer fathers sitting on the roofs of our row houses with their hands reaching to the sky, in a kind of holy benediction, as they cheered, “Fly, baby, fly!”
Some of them cried. We were racing the Russians to the moon, and we were going to win. I was six.
Then in high school, it was moons of a different sort. Moons that you pressed, displayed, and wagged. They were the kind of moons that got you suspended. Not to mention, the streaking, but streaking is comparable to the action of comets, I suppose. To strip naked and run flailing and flapping through the high school cafeteria could make you a legend when I was seventeen. I’m not saying I ever went streaking or became a legend. I’m just saying that I could testify with some expertise about the phenomenon of streaking—and the mooning, of course.
During the middle years, I watched women go into space for the first time, and thought I would have liked to have been one of them, had I been born in a different time, a different world. Instead, the women I knew were space travelers of a different sort; they traveled to America, which was like the moon compared to The Old Country. That’s what they called where they came from, The Old Country, and they taught me by action more than words that women have always been brave and adventurous and capable—always. It’s society that gets it wrong sometimes.
Now, I don’t look at the moon as much as I used to. I look at my grandchildren looking up into the night sky. With the light of the moon and stars sparkling in their eyes they whisper, “Wow!” and I remember what it was to be six and see magic in the fire of trailing rocket exhaust.
You can cover the whole moon with your thumb; you know. It’s an illusion, a trick. It’s a lesson the universe teaches us about perspective—and magic.
Linda (Because of the Moon) Zern
|
|
