The full moon rose at 7:02 to a thick mask of clouds across the sky. It was still hidden at 7:30 when I got home, but by eight, when I left the house, it had just started to present itself, scrubbed clean and polished, burning through the brutish clouds as they backed out the door, bowing graciously, saying: here you go, she’s yours now.
The ground was still wet from Monday’s rain, but I was in dire need of my astral communion, so I laid my bones prone at the feet of both moon and star, keeping all options open, aware of their power, but willing to settle for less if it gave me more time in their blinding light.
There are not many photograph of me as a young man, cameras were not so ubiquitous then. Whole chapters of my life, Arkansas, Denver, New York, Boston, even early in Wichita, exist with almost no photographic record. I hung out with writers and musicians, I wouldn’t say we were exactly starving artists, but we weren’t spending money on cameras, either.
But, there is one photo of me at about 26, leaning back in a chair, dark beard, bandana on my head, smiling at something across the room. It cycled back around on social media today. It always tears me up, maybe because I want more, maybe because I’m terrified that what I preserve in my mind will miss some parts. Maybe that’s what this journal is all about – shining that bright, blinding moonlight on all these corners of my life, just to see if anything glows in the dark.
Sometimes I don’t recognize a photograph of myself from decades past. Why should I? Even now there are too many unanswered questions. There is that guy in the photo and this image of me in the mirror, my nose almost up against the glass. No way are they the same person. But I do remember you from forty years ago, only because you come to mind often enough sometimes purposely, other times unbidden, always welcome, to refresh my brain with the memory of your presence. I wish you could of been there that day in Bern when Helga and Ilona jumped in the swirling frigid Aare river while Derek and I stood on the bank saying you must be kidding. Tom James would have jumped, screaming all the way.