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.

A Most Tender Dream

Bobby is my best friend. I think we met a year or two after high school, when he came through town and spent that week staying at Matt's. Oh, he fit in with the pack, and he came on that fated camping trip. I think we all lost some body part and gained a chunk of maturity and some life long friends.

You never know who's going to be a good, real friend. Over these many years, decades now, Bobby has become my sweetest, closest friend, the kind who can finish your sentences but doesn't even have to because you both know what you mean. It turns out we make a good team too. Before now, our time together was mostly movies and meals and volley ball and concerts and camping, talking about a book we were reading at the same time or about how to help a friend. We did a lot together. And all that good trust makes for nice work.

We are getting things done, fast and right. It's that easy quiet between us. Rigging the lights in complicated patterns, one pair at a time, with a word or two exchanged here or there, it's a sharp contrast to the catering staff, banging into each other, pans flying, clattering, the manager screaming. At one point today it got quiet and we realized they were just staring up at us, and we burst out laughing. They went back to work, jeering us raucously, but it seemed like the rest of the day went a little better. I don't know, maybe I'm projecting.

We said, let's eat at Giacomo's tonight and Bobby drove. We sat down and I asked for a glass of wine right off and then quickly ordered comfort food. I got perfectly roasted chicken, okra fried ever so lightly, and that great mac and cheese they serve in a little crock, all crispy and bubbly on top. We ate off each other's plates like always, shared a piece of flourless chocolate cake. It all tasted so good.

What I remember about this dinner is what stood out over the day: the simple, profound joy I feel in Bobby's company. When he reached over to pick at my mac and cheese, I just felt grateful to have him in my life. He looked so cute, trying to wax poetic about its savory decadence or something, but mostly just mmmm'ing his way through half the crust till I had to tap his hand with my fork and tell him to leave me some.

We talked about the lighting and the crew and about how well Celeste was doing given Matt's dickheaded decision to leave her when she got cancer and how the remission and her inheritance were fitting karma for both of them. Man, I felt so bad for thinking that all this year but I just couldn't help it. I could hardly look at Matt anymore, and he didn't really hang out with us much. Bobby said he felt the same and he wondered whether Matt would ever get it. He said, "I'd never do that to you, you know?" Not the same, of course, we're not married or anything and I don't have cancer. But I nodded, I understood his point.

We left Giacomo's and started walking toward the car and Bobby looked at the sky, early sunset colors slicing through each other, and said, "I want a cigarette." And then, "It's so nice out this evening. I'll just walk you home and then walk back to get my car." "Really?" I said. "Yeah," he said and smiled. "Come on."

We cut through what's left of Kidden Woods and walked towards my house. It still feels strange, living back here, in the house I grew up in. I got re-attached, visiting Mom when she was dying, so I decided, I guess, to get burned out at my job and take early retirement, which also seems strange -- how do you take early retirement when you feel like a teenager half the time? In my school days, I think I was a little ashamed of our old house in the old part of town, but I like living here now. The trees are tall and offer real shade.

Bobby and I sat on the top step of my front porch. The house blocked the setting sun and it was almost dark here now, just a glow left tracing the treetops. We sat side by side, and I leaned into him. He put his arm around my shoulder, cradling me, and leaned into me.

My heart fluttered. I thought, "I should have been born in 1850." Definitely a romantic. But then, I still would have been a woman and it would have been so hard to get my work published. Bobby sniffled. It sounded like a laugh, and I thought he knew what I was thinking and I sniffled back. At the same time we turned and looked at each other, and at the same time we opened our arms and wrapped them around each other and rested our heads on our shoulders and breathed, deeply, a necessary sigh.

Now my heart lifted and it felt like it burst open wide. My face was warm in his neck. He smelled really, really good. I reached a little further around him and he did the same. I felt him breathing, hard, on my neck. I started to close my eyes, trying to temper the emotion, but stopped because I could not, as I thought, quite unexpectedly, "I'm falling in love with my best friend. And he is falling in love with me too." And I wondered at how life can be.

* * *
By Trish Szymanski
(c) 2009 February 8 / 977
(c) 2009 March 23 / 952

I like dreaming.

I used to dream long, vivid dreams that I remembered in detail. Sometimes, I would awake and write them down and they would come out like saga poems.

In my teens and twenties, I dreamed stories, like being in a bookshop with my mother who was telling me how to spend my book-buying dollars, me getting frustrated and leaving, then walking back up the street to find my mother standing outside the bookshop in an animal print bikini, in the waves that crashed out of the bookstore (where presumably the ocean was), trying to avoid the shark that was swimming in the surf while getting as close a look at it as possible.

At some point, my dream memory began to fade and it seemed my dreams had become less interesting, shorter, hardly worth remembering. And then, about ten years ago, I stopped remembering my dreams altogether. It was disappointing.

Recently, I had a few long, detailed dreams, like the ones many years ago. In one of them I was in the right place at the right time to catch a baby as it popped out of a friend's vagina. It was slippery, like a greased pig, and I kept almost dropping it as I washed it off and finally managed to deliver it to its mother's stomach. Everything was OK in the end. Whew!

Another dream was long and detailed, like the old sagas, rich with emotion and images. It left me feeling vulnerable and so alive, in that messy, real way.

I couldn't get it out of my head and for a few days I told it over and over, to different people. A friend said it sounded like a great short film. Finally, I wrote it down and couldn't stop until it was done. I embellished it in the writing, just a little, because now the narrative had grabbed me and I did begin to see it as a story, like I used to, maybe even a film. The process of writing it took away the compulsion to tell it. The narrative passed through me, and like a fine filter, it dragged out of me strong emotions, some pleasant, others not so much.

After talking with close friends and confidants, I take this dream as a significant signpost along the amazing personal journey I've been on for the past couple of years. I like the direction it says I'm pointed in.

I'll post it here in time. The photograph in this entry is of my bedroom, where I dreamed this most tender dream.