It’ll happen sometimes, when no one is around ruin it.  When circumstance can foil the enormity of even my ego and force upon it some measure of humility. When the fire-snorting, blowhardy self-defense throwback of constant companion cockiness can take a breather and let decent human gratitude take the wheel for a change.  When I can look up at a moon as imperfect as me and know – not think, not believe, but know - how much smaller I am than it.

To think of all the moons hanging in all the skies I’ve seen on this planet, it began with this one in this sky over a trailer park in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere [no zip code].

She called it a “life like a rocket,” and that it was every bit.  Against the best judgments of plebeians and patricians, against the best work of magistrates and noblemen, it went up and up and up   The smart money frequently was against me ever seeing another birthday, let alone the ridiculous expanse of humanity that has been my good fortune to bear witness.  Genetics predicted a trainwreck in slow motion instead of the first-class express out of this one-horse town, the track being laid only just before the train rattled through.

O’ the stops it made for the meager fare I held.  The white maned breakers of an angry Atlantic.  The warm glow of The Bronx from a bridge blanketed in fog.  The catapulting sunrise of the Mexican Gulf from the deck of a oil barge longer than my neighborhood.   The face of one people’s God laid out in a square kilometer of glass two centimeters square.

The youthful fury of a circle pit swinging to a song that changed their lives forever.  The sympathetic stare of an overflowing church.  The flirtatious wink of a Sunset Boulevard transvestite.  The smirk from a savior into a self-made silo of snow.  The naked terror of a colleague shit-scared by a rough wave.  The approving grin of a tandem skydiver.

The blue of the Baltic just before the sun set.  The tendril of light sneaking its way into the oldest building man had ever made.  The embarrassed giggle of a 70-year-old serenaded atop the Sears Tower. The resigned sigh of a broken old man who could have been a grieving father.  And the astonished, teary-eyed exclamation of a mother thoroughly fooled.

Every one a miracle that would have made the little life this was supposed to be as full as could be expected.  Every other a priceless gift impossible to purchase for fair market value.

In the right light at the right time, the sum of those sights has mass.  What reaction is appropriate when it is considered?

Nothing, I suppose, but to sit quietly grateful under another full moon, in awe of the shadow of my own luck.

» You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.