An Old Moment

Last night, I went out with friends to see the

TOTAL
LUNAR
ECLIPSE

and possibly a meteor shower.

We set out at about 1:45am, bundled up as best we could, with a sack of goodies to help convince us that if we went out there, into the middle of the freezing cold night, we would not die.

We made our way towards the fields at Lincoln Park, stopped for coffee. (Who knew Al’s Diner at 2:00am was going to be a see-and-be-seen venue?) I launched my StarWatch app and we pointed out the beginning of the show to the waitresses and then headed out.

We drove around the park and over Route 440, made camp in the car at the edge of the Hackensack River, and watched the earth eat the moon. Bit by bit, it blackened the satellite’s full, bright face. And as it got closer to full coverage, sure enough, the predictions came true – the moon turned RED!

Or rather, sepia. That’s what our driver was saying. I was saying, “RED!” She was saying, “No. It’s not red. It’s more brownish.” “No way! That is, um, reddish!”

The iPhone sound track started with the Fifth Dimension singing “Age of Aquarius”. Then two of us broke out with a very gusty “Red Rubber Ball”, inspiring all of us to produce a new act for the occasion:

Band Name: Sepia Moon

Album: Beyond the Tinge

First Hit Single: You Never See That

Plus, ten cosmic tracks, including

• Moon to Earth 1: Get Out of the Fucking Way, It’s Cold Up Here.
• Moon to Earth 2: We Get It, You’re Floyd Fans.
• Earth to Newark: What’s With the Lights, Largest Commercial Seaport in the Continental United States, Huh?
• 72 Minutes Means the Earth is Fat
and
• It Really Happens Every Friday


A glow of almost gold capped what used to be our moon, lying across the top of this now unfamiliar circle in the sky, like snow atop an Arizona mesa, only 235,857 miles away, straight up.

And then, it got cinematic. The glow slid slowly down, over the face of the ball, and illuminated it more brightly than I ever expected, until it became not a disc, not a circle in the sky, but a three-dimensional glowing solid mass. It was a body, suspended, full, alive, incredibly precious. I whooped, my mouth opened, I stared. I said, “I read that 1638 was the last time this happened on the winter solstice. It was so beautiful here then.” I thought about what it must have seemed like to those people, the Lenape, the Algonquin, the Mohawk, the Africans, the Europeans.

Now, the moon looked like a glow-in-the-dark superball, like Orion’s belt in Men In Black. But it was so real that some part of my brain kept looking to see, how did it stay there? And I had to tell myself again that it is the pull of the sun, behind us now, that keeps it there, that keeps us here, that in this miraculous universe planets, moons, stars and dust spin around each other, a phone plays songs and maps the eternity above us, and friends share an old moment in a new time.

So, no meteor shower. But that was awesome.