Salamander
Fire Walking

“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” never struck me as the height of poetic imagery, but I never appreciated what a travesty those lyrics were until this morning. I was about five minutes into my trip to work, running about five minutes late. I wasn’t particularly worried about the late part because I’d had to go into work two hours early yesterday. Being five minutes late today seemed a pale (and totally legitimate) recompense. I turned left at a busy intersection, passed through a shallow cut in a stony ridge that supports a railroad bridge above the road, and as I approached the next light I confronted what had to be the largest moon I’ve seen in my no longer short life. There was no need to look up when the full moon was this month. The evidence of lunar alignment was dead ahead of me, suspended just above the horizon.

I understand why the moon appears so large when it approaches the horizon. The natural legerdemain of distance and perspective tricks the brain into misinterpreting size. But this was not the moment to dwell on the scientific niceties of how the central nervous system can be duped. The sight of the bright silver-blue globe with its ghostly grey shadow patterns struck me as hard as any blow. I was seeing the moon for the first time. I was falling love all over again. I was transported out of the stop-and-go traffic to a place I have visited only infrequently since childhood. Pizza pie had nothing to do with it.

As I sat at the light I held my thumb up to measure the moon against the size of my thumb nail. I remember doing that as a kid. Back then, the moon and my thumb nail were about the same size. This morning my thumb nail was twice as big as the lunar orb. I’ve grown over the years. Somehow it’s made the moon seem further away. But when I lowered my hand, the moon still hung there as though I could cup it in my hand.

The light turned green and I made my right turn. The moon followed over my left shoulder, and paced me for the next several miles. I passed through two traffic lights, keeping my fingers crossed for red so that I could turn and look again, but both times the lights were green. The third light I encountered turned red as I approached.

The moon was closer to the horizon, but still not touching. I cursed my luck, because the leading half of the moon’s face was blocked by a telephone pole. Then I noticed that because I had the pole as a point of reference, I could discern the movement of the moon through the sky as it slanted its way further down to the west. In increments too small to describe I watched as the moon passed behind the pole to the other side. The face of the moon was not quite fully freed when the light turned green again.

I began the final segment of my drive with the moon still at my side. In a moment of serendipity that amazed nearly as much as the moon itself, my CD player moved to “Shining My Flashlight on the Moon”, a song that has some special meaning for me anyhow.

Just before the turn towards my building, the road bent left. I followed the twist and had a final face-to-face glimpse of the moon before I continued on a route that turned my back to it. Through my speakers Christine Lavin was singing:

I leave the car by the roadside and I hike up that hill
Stars circle in slow motion here as they always will
A million miles away from where I was this afternoon
I wrap my misgivings in a tune
While I’m shining my flashlight on the moon

I pulled through the security gates at work thinking about timelessness. The moon was setting. The stars were tracing an unseen trail in the morning light, keeping time with the moon whether or not I could see them. The sun was rising, following the path that would eventually take it to the western horizon as well.

It’s all one big circle. Not lost to me was the fact that most of this motion was artifact. The moon wasn’t setting. The stars weren’t setting. The sun wasn’t rising. I was on the face of a spinning globe, a cog within a universe of cogs. Some days that’s a frightening thing, but this morning it made me feel like I belonged.

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We’re all creatures of a three dimensional universe, bound in place by the fourth dimension, time, which holds a sign reading “one way”. Sometimes I imagine that death simply breaks the bounds of time, and lets us slip back and forth along the timeline of our own life. I could imagine an eternity of revisiting any moment of my past, with the opportunity to feel and smell and notice little details all over again. If that’s the case, I can see spending millennia driving into work on this morning, watching the moon as if it were for the first time.

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In case you are like me, and your elementary school teacher told you that the sun and moon looked bigger because the atmosphere is thicker at the horizon and acts like a magnifying glass, you might enjoy the following two links that actually explain the real reason the moon looks bigger when it is close to setting.

Wiki Answers: Why does the moon appear to be bigger on the horizon than in the sky?

BBC: Why does the moon look so big now?