Rare Cosmic Events

a different age, a different time, a different view

On the evening of August 30, 2023, the fourth anniversary of our first date, B. and I went to the beach after a midweek church service to observe the super blue moon.

Shoes in hand, sand glued and scattered up to our rolled-up pant cuffs, we felt mini-sized, walking next to the gargantuan pumpkin-colored satellite that hung out over the water.

Now, super blue moons are extremely rare. A simple blue moon is designated when a full moon shows up twice in the same month; they occur on average, about once every 33 months or 41 times a century. Super moons occur when the full moon is at or near its closest point to Earth, three to four times per year. But the very rare super blue moon occurs when both of those events happen simultaneously, sometimes as much as 20 years apart.

After the short walk, with bottoms fully plopped in the sand and the two of us fully wooed by the moon dance in front of us, we put our life into chapters and embraced the perfect one we were sharing right then.

Some philosophers say that life is all about expectations. I never expected to fall in love again in my late sixties. Therefore, the taste of that blue moon love slice was that much sweeter.

Furthermore, I didn’t live the first five decades of my life with love at the center.

Because most of my family lived in Missouri, my New York City weekends made casual visits to them improbable, and traditional holidays sporadic. So, the distance between my rural childhood venue and my life grew ever more profound, and the love became more distilled and distant. Because pure, unmitigated ambition fueled my urban life, weekends were spent in the office, home in solitary recovery or on a flight to somewhere—often China.

It wasn’t until my sixties, the years preceding my retirement, that I turned to look back at the road I’d paved.

I saw the potholes that had materialized on the motorway that had led to my success.

I retired. I rewired and resolved to live differently. Even though I did not imagine a new partner in my life, I did resolve to have more love in my life.

I made more trips to Missouri; my family visited me and we sometimes traveled together. I read. I prayed.

I found a space for my new outlook when I bought a house in Florida. In January of 2020, my sister’s youngest son came to help me get settled. I felt guilty because he was there on her birthday.

While helping me get settled he asked for a screwdriver and I handed him a small six or seven-inch device with lavender flowers on the handle.

From atop the ladder he asked what he was supposed to do with the little gadget that was indeed shaped liked a screwdriver, but more closely resembled an eyelash separator.

“Where did you even find it?” he asked in wonderment, as he turned it over in his hand.  

I defensively and lightheartedly declared that I did not remember, but I added that I actually thought it was quite pretty.

He rolled his eyes and the next thing I knew we were in my car on the way to Home Depot.

I’d never been.

“You’re in a house now, not your NYC co-op. You may have to fix a few things yourself.” My decades-younger nephew counseled me like a father leaving his college daughter in her first dorm room.

Once there, he grabbed a basket and we headed down the aisles of Home Depot. I told him I wanted a tool bag and not a box. (I have a passion for handbags.) He pulled one off the shelf and we proceeded to fill the small red and black canvas with sturdy hammers and pliers. Their utility was so profound and their aesthetics so ugly that I found them to be of no interest to me whatsoever. Pulling the very best box-cutter off the display, and putting it in the tool bag, he cautioned that he would have to instruct me how to close it safely. 

We called my sister during the spree, who laughed for the entire call. She asked me if he knew that I would never touch the bag once he left. I admonished her to never tell.

I think it was in the midst of the hammer choices that I choked up a bit. I looked over at my handsome forty-something nephew and realized I was just getting to know him. The kindness he put on display was much more interesting to me than all the other merchandise stacked up in the store.

So along with the new tools in the bag, I quietly took some of his thoughtfulness and made it my own. It was an electric minute; I felt the new intention charge through me like a gone-wild current.

A bit later, over in the garbage can department he swore that he could get the largest one in the store into the trunk of my car.

“You need this big one,” he instructed as he piled it in the basket on top of the tool bag.

Later, in the parking lot, one arm resting on the open door of the car and one foot on the floorboard, I watched him jam the monster into the trunk.

The sun never took a break during that maneuver. In my mind, I clicked a snapshot and put the mental picture away. In the future, I would pull that photo out again and register the size of the gift I’d captured.

On my high-speed trip to the top of my career, I’d had no time to have anything close to the three-son family that my sister had nested. That birthday, she gave me her son for a day. None of us could have known that would it be her last, as she would die of Covid in September of that awful year.

The two of us, J. and I, clicked our car doors shut, turned up the radio and sped east on Donald Ross Road. I don’t really remember what music was playing, but when we put things together, future to past, we can take the liberty to imagine the music. I’m sure it was Neil Diamond singing “Sweet Caroline.” “Good times never seemed so good. I’ve been inclined to believe they never would.”

If someone had told me in my thirties that one perfect love-filled moment in my life would someday be my nephew driving me home from a Florida Home Depot visit, I might have delivered (after I managed to recover my full speech capacity) a short oration indicating that macaroni appeared to be masquerading for the messenger’s brains.  

“Water, softest thing on earth, gentleness that wears away rock.” So goes one of my favorite lines from the poet Ellen Bass.

Life, like water, washes over us, and the newfound round edges slither more easily into divine asylums. The ordinary becomes the extraordinary when the mind chatter stops. The “I shoulds” become an ancient reveille that are heeded with less urgency, or perhaps not at all.    

It's one of the finer pleasures that occurs with what is otherwise referred to as the nightmare of aging.

When our younger lives are revved up and fueled by a full tank of ambition, the same life moments happen, but they’re clipped by our work ethic. We are mentally answering the work email, while the life tools are being assembled in the bag, and as a consequence, some essentials get left on the shelf.

Later in life, circumstances balance more easily in the middle of a fulcrum between heart and head. I still analyze plenty, but my heart opens readily when emotional moments come into view. I don’t push through them to get to the next most important item on the list.

And yes, I believe that’s the sweet side of aging. And yes, I admit there’s not another career milestone I hope to ever achieve.

At long last I no longer feel like I have to take charge of the flow of the river; I can drift with its course.

On the beach with B., I picked up a fistful of sand. I pondered how many rocks had been ground into grains to create the long beach. I knew how much living it had taken to hold softness in the palm of my hand and take the time to watch it spill through my fingers.

It was a long time ago when I realized that my only chance to have it all was to not have it all at once. I had no plan for that insight, but the order and content of the chapters have certainly written themselves exactly that way. It is not true for everyone, but it has been true for me.

Look at me, look at me, the super blue moon silently called as she pushed through the clouds, waving her gold beams everywhere. I took a picture of B. taking a picture. His face in the foreground, camera light spotlighting his profile, and moonlit silhouettes behind him apparently doing the same thing.

If I were to assemble another one of those old-fashioned photo albums, I’d make a super blue moon page. Center place would be B. and those silhouettes. I’d have to do word pictures for some of the rest of the rare slices of life that I’ve learned to see, because even after I could appreciate the moments, I still did not take the time to memorialize their presence.    

Time clocks tock. As the ticks grow louder I long for the road to roll out longer in front of me. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t.

As the wise Tibetan monk said, “We all begin dying on the day we are born. The only thing in question is when.”

I Googled the date of the next super blue moon.

March 31^st was the date that showed up.

 “Let’s put the date on our calendar to be right here on this beach for the next super blue moon.”

B. readily agreed.

Phones in hand we each put the meeting on our calendar for the March 31, 2037 event.

We whispered, to each other, the mid-eighties ages we would be.

“Be here, B.,” I commanded, “No matter what.”

“Be here?” he queried back. “Of course. I’ll be driving us down.”