The Man in the Moon, The Canary in the Mine

I often times don't know whether to trust my memories of early childhood, because they have more often than not been colored by the stories I heard about them. But there is one, being fundamentally different from the others, that rings true. It is like a video that only lasts three or four seconds without any context other than what it is. It is night time. I am standing on a dinning car seat at a table with the uncleared plates of a finished meal and a small center piece containing a single red rose. I look away from my mother who is holding me erect. My hands and my nose and mouth press against the glass. I am balancing myself with the gentle sway of the car, looking out upon a ghostly lit landscape, looking up at the full moon. I see the face of that man in the moon so clear that it is almost cartoonish in my memory, and I hear my mother's voice tell me that he will always watch over me, and the memory ends as abruptly as it began. I hold on to that memory like a precious gem that will someday have to be pawned to buy my way out of all that is made up in life.  

A couple of nights ago the boy stopped over with his girl for a late dinner and some talk. An accident up the street put a few blocks in darkness, and after a while of sitting and talking in the candle light, the girl informed us that she would step out onto the stoop to have a smoke. The boy is 13 and I suspect she is not any older, but critiquing such behavior is not in my job description, so I headed out with them. The street was bathed in the same ghostly light of my memory and as is my habit, I looked for the moon.

I admit that sometimes when I look up I only see the moon, but more often than not I immediately take in that big smiling face, and it is damn comforting. So anyway, I look up and say how the man in the moon is watching over us. The boy has heard me mention the man in the moon often enough, and it never occurred to me that he was humoring me, but the girl is not much for humoring people and she says the what is doing what? I am incredulous that she doesn't know what I am talking about. I ask her if she has never heard of the man in the moon, and she assures me that she has not. So I  indicate that I am sorry that she has been so deprived, but that surely simply looking up she can see the face. She thinks I have a screw loose. I ask the boy to help me out here only to discover that he has never been sure as to what the hell I have been talking about either.

That these two were never raised to look for the face is one thing, but the idea that they can't see it when pointed out is completely another. So I asked my grandson about it yesterday when he stopped over and he conceded that a leap of the imagination in the spirit of a Rorschach test, then maybe. I tell you I was dumbfounded by this. And it made me wonder about the source of what I can clearly see and source of what they clearly can not. I have never thought of myself as anybody who disparages knowledge no matter where it is found. I may be making more of this than is warranted, because after all my test group here consists of three people, but I wonder if those guys dancing around on the moon is some dividing line. That prior to that marvelous achievement of walking on that heavenly real-estate, there was actually some sense of mystery and wonder that made such imaginings easy, and that once accomplished, the knowledge gained has some capacity to bypass the imagination in a way that is irretrievable.

If it is true, it saddens me. In some strange way it makes me think of a give and take that was all too common in the routines my parents played on the vaudeville stage as a child, where my mother would have some way of tapping her finger on the plate she was holding or upon giving him a smile in a certain way that signaled trouble my father would turn to the audience and say how as an old miner he understood a canary in the mine moment when it was upon him, which amused the audience in a twofold manner: the fact that he was in trouble and the idea that this man who acted and, in every sense, was very much a dandy, referred to himself as an old miner.