Blue Moon

Red sky at morning. . . . The weather will be rough here today. I'm afraid I won't get to see the Blue Moon tonight. It doesn't come around much. It is rare enough that we have a Full Moon on New Year's Eve, but a Blue Moon. . . ! I wonder when that last happened? Good or bad ju-ju? I don't know, but it is auspicious enough. For those of you wondering, a Blue Moon is the second full moon of the month. In addition to everything else, this is the 13th moon of the year. I don't believe in magic or supernatural things at all, but there are plenty who do, and they are bound to be hoppin' and boppin' tonight. I don't know enough about the different calendars to say whether this is important to many other cultures. There are Lunar Calendars, Solar Calendars, and others based on arithmetic. There is a Hebrew Calendar and an Islamic Calendar, and I don't know what all else. I don't think anyone is using the Aztec system any longer, though that one seems intriguing.

But I don't feel terrible about not knowing these things. Bad, but not terrible. Last night on the Weather Channel, the woman anchoring the broadcast told her fellow anchor, "Tomorrow night is New Year's Eve. It makes you feel patriotic, doesn't it?" I sat for a few minutes trying to figure that one out. Maybe she thought that New Year's Eve was an American thing. At first, I thought she might be an idiot, but then I thought she probably knew something about the calendars that I don't. Maybe it is an American thing. One has to be careful. It is easy to fall down the Rabbit Hole when one begins to opine.

I have been invited to a party tonight to which I have no desire to go. It will be a good one cast in a big urban apartment with a wide, movie-set balcony high in the air with a sweeping view of the city. The company will be educated and handsome and sophisticated, though none of them so much as we, but good enough. I do not like to go out on New Year's Eve, though, do not like this silly celebration driven by mechanical time, Newtonian time, by the perfect intervals of the clock that beats us down and wears us out and is the terror of our existence.

Ten years ago, I sat on a dock near my home drinking champagne with a woman much younger than myself. We drank and snuggled against one another to beat the coolness of the night and looked out across the water into the night's clear sky. Ours had not become a country of victims yet, terrorized and terrified and staunch. All that lay ahead without our knowing. There was, of course, the Y2K scare, but sitting on the dock, that night, watching the starlight undulating in the dark breeze, we felt neither fear nor dread, only wonder. We did not have a watch and did not know the time, and we wondered aloud if the century had yet changed. And just then, as in a novel or movie (or hack blog spot), a voice came through the air, loud and clear from some infinite distance, cold and tinny like the faceless voice of a mechanical god. By a freak coincidence of nature, through a confluence of atmospheric pressures and wind direction and who knows what other factors, we heard the New Year's countdown from the city's center miles away--"Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven. . . ." And in that enchanted instant, we held one another in an eternal kiss standing at the precipice of a new century. For one Golden Moment we were gathered up, bracketed in time and space, frozen at the Fin de Siecle.

As moments must, this one unfroze, and as the night slipped away, I knew we were Janus-faced lovers looking in different directions, me with nostalgia back at the old century, her with wild enthusiasm forward to the new. I was not foolish enough to be unaware that night, just foolish enough.

So tonight, we say goodbye to the old decade, though not really. Bush and his dragoons are gone, but their influence remains as we limp along struggling with the crippling legacy. It has not been much of a century so far, I think, though that golden girl has done incredibly well. Maybe it was her century after all.

I may reconsider going out tonight. As I wrote it, standing on that chic balcony didn't sound all that bad. Even if I do go, though, I won't be there at midnight. I'd rather be home to light the fire of the new era.