May 27, 2010
Indulge me in a moment of silly reflection: I walked my dog earlier this evening. He's a 6 year old miniature poodle, a full-fledged family member with rights and responsibilities and no concept that he and I are of different species, which I consider a great compliment. (I'm bigger. He gets that. He's smarter. I understand.)
Anyway, around the corner from my house we passed a neighbor who for some reason whimsical or otherwise had left several tire-sized patches of vegetation growing robustly amidst their otherwise groomed parking strip. Naturally Geoffrey--my dog--wanted to make intimate acquaintance with several of them, long grasses being, in a poodle's mind, where truth and treasure lie. As he explored and expelled I noted that one of the patches was not grass at all, but clover, in full spring bloom. I found myself, for a moment as I stared at it, slipping into one of those marvelously, terrifyingly comforting moments when one's life shrinks to the size of--did I say a tire? fair enough. A smallish thing, in front of one's nose.
And right away I thought about the moon. For some years in the 1980s and '90s I traveled a great deal for work. (For some years in the early Aughts as well, but I'm thinking of an earlier time.) I remember watching a Harvest Moon rising (this would have been the early '90s) from a waterside perch outside Savannah, Georgia--a beautiful town by the way, if you've never been--and thinking at first the utterly commonplace thought that this sweet spectacle was being viewed simultaneously (time zones be damned) the world over, and secondly that I personally had seen eight rising moons from eight different locations in the past eight months, ranging from Bali to Florida to Oklahoma to La Jolla to New Jersey to....you get the idea. A lot of Frequent Flyer miles, back when they got you something--i.e., more travel. (Rather like a scheme whereby enough trips to the dentist gets you a free root canal...) Anyway, I was struck at the moment by the notion that the sight of the rising moon at each of these locales had been a comfort to me--a touch of familiarity and expectation, often in places where just about everything else was unfamiliar and unexpected. (I'm thinking especially of Oklahoma City.) The moon said hey, I said hey back, and that little snippet of admittedly sophomoric revelation made it easier to go back to yet another hotel room and try to figure out the cable channels.
Back to the clover. Poodle at hand (on leash) I zeroed in on a patch that he had not visited. It was just common clover, growing thick and happy, white/pink blossoms nodding their over-sized heads in the breeze. As a small child in Ohio I loved clover, for sort of an odd reason--because I was deathly afraid of bees and other stinging insects (an imprinted fear from my mother, who was deathly afraid of the oddest things). But bees loved clover, and, as scared as I was of them, I loved bees. When the clover in my scrubby suburban back yard was in bloom, which was most of the spring and summer, I could lie on my stomach in the infrequently-mowed lawn and watch the bees come and go, confident that I had much less to offer than the blossoms a few inches from my nose. The bees cared not a whit for me. (I tried to crush as few flowers as possible.) They would fly in and do their bee things, and I could practically kiss them with no worries. I spent a lot of hours like this. (Give me a break here. It was central Ohio, and I hadn't discovered the fiddle yet.)
So. As I stared at that patch of un-peed clover, I was, suddenly, completely and utterly unexpectedly transported to central Ohio on a hot May afternoon. I could feel the cool grass tickling my bare legs as I sprawled on the lawn; I could taste the horrible instant iced tea my mother would make for us by the plastic pitcher full. I could hear the non-stop whine of mowers and edgers and trimmers up and down the twisty, blacktopped streets, and smell the sharp bite of gasoline, charcoal fluid and gin that was the unmistakable odor of a mid-Ohio housing development summer. I could see my mom and dad, dead these several years now, sitting just inside the sliding screen door, cigarettes in hand, seeming to me unhappy about everything. I could feel myself aching to be up and grown and gone. Then Geoffrey tugged the leash, and I was me and here and now again. And off we went.
Immediately, I looked for the moon. The same moon I'd have seen on a sultry summer night in Ohio, rising above the stunted trees that grew by the fetid creek across the street, behind the neighbors' cheap tract houses, nearly identical yet somehow always grander than our own. And the same moon I saw later, from college only forty miles up the road but a million years and ideas away, and then from the west of Ireland and London and Edinburgh and Wales, and then from Boston and Vermont and New Hampshire and Manhattan and North Carolina and Virgina, and then from Seattle and Vancouver and California and Utah and all the Wild West,from Sitka and Houston and St. Paul and DesMoines and Bali and Sydney and Zagreb and Mostar and Copenhagen and Florence and Sienna and Paris and Heidelberg and the list goes on, but the moon was always there. And then I looked back at the clover.
It's always there too. It's not always clover. The trick is to see it. Because sometimes it's cloudy, and you have to take the moon on faith.
