It was a little before midnight and I lay in bed, my wife snoring softly beside me, her arm over my chest. Our lights had just been extinguished and I lay in bed, growing hot. I lifted her arm, softly, and crawled out of the bed. I dressed and left the house to clear my head.
Our street seemed dark and the air was nibbling cold (not yet October, biting season). I retrieved our garbage and recycling cans from the curb, then started on a walk around the block. As I turned the corner I passed houses full of (I supposed) sleeping neighbors, and the night seemed to be mine alone.
I passed the dark bushes on my left and mused to myself that they were probably full of spiders, awake and hunting, but I was interrupted in mid-thought as I looked up.
In the sky over the trees was the faint outline of the mountaintop to the east, seeming too high in the air and without foundation. Behind was a faint halo of bluish-white - the moon about to rise.
I had never seen the moon rise before and I stared at it for a moment, wondering, then began to walk up the hill toward the glow as if I could approach it. The vision was hidden by trees as I continued onward but then exposed again as a half-moon, impossibly large and majestic and mystical. I stopped in my tracks and watched as it rose fully from behind its mountain , its outline shifting and bending. When it was free I applauded there, alone on the sidewalk. Nature had performed, I thought, for me alone. I thought of old men long ago with their telescopes, looking up and feeling young.
I walked on, smiling, hearing the distant ch-ch-ch of a sprinkler as I rounded the corner once more. I thought of my favorite poem by Walt Whitman as I made my last turn. I walked down the hill toward home, the garage lights triggered by my motion casting lines on the street beside me, stark and unlike the willowy swaying of the trees over me. I heard the cricket song for the first time, the baying of dogs on the next block, and at last the chill of my bald head in the breeze dispelled the magic fully.
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| WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; | |
| When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; | |
| When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; | |
| When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, | |
| How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; | 5 |
| Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, | |
| In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, | |
| Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. --Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass, 1900 |
