Uber Moon

While I’m yet feeling the effects of our most recent super moon, I recall the first time I heard a reference to something other than a regular, monthly run of the mill full moon.

The precise year escapes me, but it was a Saturday night because we were watching Hockey Night in Canada and the late game was coming from Calgary. During Ron MacLean’s preamble, he mentioned the full moon was in fact a rare super moon, so called as it would appear fourteen per cent larger due to its closer-than-usual proximity to Earth. The accompanying camera shot was of a huge golden disc hanging low over the city skyline. It was impressive, all right; and that was compared to any number of the robust harvest moons I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’d never heard of a super moon until that night.

Now it seems we get them all the time.

On hearing that this April’s full moon was a super one, I asked Ter, “Didn’t we just have one of those?”

She thought so but wasn’t wholly certain of when. “Was it in January?”

Maybe. The wolf moon? Wasn’t there a blue moon in January, too? A blue wolf super moon? There are so many anomalies that “anomaly” is now synonymous with “routine”.

April’s moon was extra-extra-special (not a typo) because it was not only a super moon (appearing seventeen per cent larger than usual, and a full three per cent larger than the HNIC super moon), it was a pink super moon. Not genuinely pink, the experts were quick to add lest a torrent of complaints flood social media when the hue failed to meet mass expectations of fuchsia, but pink because it coincided with the blooming of a particular spring flower whose name I don’t remember.

I actually thought it looked a tad rosier than usual, but I may have imagined it:

Anyway, it seems that almost every full moon has become a super one, which reminded me of an online survey I once took after making a purchase at a housewares and home décor shop. Through the course of the survey, the questions were geared toward elevating my experience beyond the mere purchase of sought-after goods. “What can we do to make your next visit a great experience?”

“You can’t,” I replied. “I got what I went for.”

After asking where the chain fit in my preferred shopping outlets (they were third), came the question: “How can we become your favourite source for housewares/home décor?”

“You can’t,” I replied, “unless you put more staff at the checkout and fewer staff on the floor. I was in the line up to pay for longer than it took to find my candles.”

Not that my comment had anything to do with it, but the chain’s local outlet is now closed, as is that of the second shop in my top three.

What has this to do with the super moon, you ask? Nothing ... except I am bewildered and slightly annoyed by the current era’s insistence on making everything bigger and brighter and shinier. Once “super” becomes the norm, it ceases to be a big deal.

Shadow the Sun

Everyone was talking about it. The news constantly updated us on where to go, what time to be there, and what degree of eye protection was required to view last week’s solar eclipse. It was such a significant event that I almost took the day off to watch it from the beach across the street. I would have done it, too, had Monday been Ter’s scheduled day off. As she’s been an integral part of the HQ wildfire response all summer, taking an errant vacation day wasn’t likely to be approved, so off we went to our respective workplaces, me trying to convince myself that it wasn’t such a big deal, it was only an eclipse, for Pete’s sake, the world was not going to stop just to watch a shadow fall over the sun.

Only it kinda sorta did.

Happily, the timing for totality in Victoria coincided with mid-morning coffee. If I couldn’t experience the event with Ter, I decided, the next best person was my wee sister. The library courtyard where she takes her breaks (and where we have coffee on Thursdays) faces east. The sun would be in full view when it all went dark.

Only it didn’t all go dark. At around nine-thirty, the sky went a little weird, like the planetarium light before the show starts. Half an hour later, I headed to the library, where wee sis was indeed parked in place on the wall. The light hadn’t changed much. In fact, the sun seemed as bright and furious as ever—to the naked eye, anyway. People had gathered in groups for the momentous occasion, equipped with NASA-approved dark glasses, projectors made of cereal boxes, or the infamous paper with a hole poked in the middle (I’ve never understood how that works). Wee sis and I were unarmed. I had my phone to track the timing, but she only had her coffee. She seemed less excited about the event than I was, though she smiled when I said I wanted to share it with someone I love. I wasn’t so driven to see the eclipse itself; I wanted to feel it. You know, to feel the wonder of dwindling daylight on a mid-summer morning, and to experience a rare and extraordinary event in the company of my fellow humans.

Canada was outside the so-called “band of totality”; in Victoria, the sun was only ninety percent obscured by the moon. As peak time neared, wee sis shaded her eyes and risked a peripheral glance in the general direction of the sun. “It doesn’t look any darker to me,” she said.

I concurred. Despite knowing we wouldn’t get a total eclipse, I’d hoped for something more dramatic in the light department, like a ninety percent drop from what’s normal for the time. I, too, chanced a glance at the sun, but all I glimpsed was the usual glare. “It’s gotten cold, though,” said the friend who had joined us.

She was right. A definite chill had descended though the light remained the same. In fact, the temperature plunged in those few minutes. It seems obvious now, but I hadn’t anticipated a chill. That was—literally and figuratively—cool!

Back at the office, folks were a little disappointed that complete darkness hadn’t dropped on the day. A couple of my co-workers were discussing it when I stopped in the kitchen to make tea. After listening to a minute of them puzzling over why it didn’t go darker outside, I suddenly said, “It’s a good metaphor, though, don’t you think?”

They looked even more puzzled. “How do you mean?” one of them asked.

“Well, the moon blocked out ninety percent of the sun, yet the light was as bright as if it had only blocked ten percent. So, metaphorically, one bright spirit will shed more light than nine cast in shadow. ‘How far that little candle throws its beam’, you know?”

Admittedly, I got a couple of odd looks, but after they thought about it, they also got my point. It was later said that, for a couple of minutes on August 21, the violence and hatred stopped as everyone looked up at the sky in a shared moment of purest awe. We are all connected. We are all rays of light. Ninety percent of us can falter in the shadows, but so long as the other ten stay strong, the world will not go totally dark.

With love,

Starlight

A light year is the length of time it takes for light to travel from its source to Earth. A star that shines a hundred light years away can die, but the light will continue to shine for a century before we’ll see it go out.

A lot of stars have gone out this year. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. Leonard Cohen. Prince. George Michael. (That one hurt more than the others put together because I have more of his albums than I do of all the others put together.) Then, in tragically quick succession, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. It seems to me that a mass exodus is happening, but I may only be so aware of it because these famous names are a part of my generation; after all, thousands of people die every day and most of us don’t even blink. At least the famous ones leave behind a legacy of work that keeps them alive in the hearts of their fans.

Truth is, the world is always a little bit darker when someone dies.

I like to watch Jeopardy! to test my memory banks and see how far out of the loop I’ve fallen with regard to pop culture. Once in a while, I’ll take an inexplicable shine to a contestant and root for that person through victory after victory. Halfway through December, a quiet young woman named Cindy Stowell won her first game and took her place as the defending champion. Her run took her through six wins and over $100,000, before she was inevitably defeated. She gave Ter and me more than one heart attack over the course of her appearance—she wasn’t always quick with the buzzer, but she consistently came back from the red to win the game with a clever bet on the Daily Double or knowing the answer to an obscure Final Jeopardy question. And she never lost her cool. She was a little mouse with big eyes and dark hair, a shy smile and sweet demeanour. Something about her was delightful and fragile and made you want to cheer for her.

On her seventh appearance, at the start of the game, Alex Trebek mentioned that her goal had been to win $100,000 and she had accomplished this with her previous win. My radar pinged with an uh oh, and sure enough, regrettably, she lost her seventh game. At the end of that show, however, a clip of Mr Trebek came up after the credits, in which he explained that, during the filming of Cindy’s shows a few weeks earlier, she had been fighting stage four cancer. She lost her battle with it on December 5, almost two weeks before her shows aired. In short, she had already departed when her championship run was broadcast.

Like a little star whose light took a few weeks to wink out of our sky.

“The Day of Undying Loyalty”

My father could have been Jon Bon Jovi.

Well, not really.

For one thing, JBJ is a year younger than I am, and no matter how quirky are quantum physics, even a Master of the Universe would have trouble engineering that one.

I mean that Dad and JBJ were born on the same day—albeit thirty-one years apart. According to Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers in The Secret Language of Birthdays, anyone born on March 2 will share a bunch of specific traits with millions of others, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Dr. Seuss, Desi Arnaz, John Irving, and the latter half of Simon & Schuster.

So how is it that not everyone born on this date is a rock star, politician, artist, journalist, or business magnate? Personality plays such a strong part in who we are, and an equally strong part in what we become, but every soul is a snowflake. Give each child in a kindergarten class a box of Crayolas and watch how their drawings differ.

It’s half what you get and half what you do with it. What you get is, I believe, predetermined. What you do with it is up to you. We are as much a product of our environment in this life as we are ourselves, and our personalities dictate how we develop, how we adapt, how we endure, and, perhaps, whether or not we survive. I am unsure how much of what we are is influenced by planetary alignment at the time of birth, but I do wonder if the range of available traits depends on the astronomical tableau. I’ve heard that personality is connected to the ego/intellect, and that tells me it’s disposable, as in, we neither bring those traits with us when we come nor take them with us when we go. We might take the knowledge of how to use them, maybe to wield them more confidently in the next go-round, or to leave them in the box and try something else instead … and start by choosing another birthdate.

For the record, my father may not be a rock star, politician, artist, journalist or business magnate to the rest of the world, but in a very real way, he is each of these things to me.

Happy birthday, Dad.

With love,