Lunar song
Thursday July 10th 2014, 10:40 pm
Filed under: Life

People here used to call northern California mellow. With a bit of a sense of superiority: we’re not crowded, we’re not Hollywood-shallow, we’re not into road rage. We don’t say the 101 or the 5 or the anything, the freeways are simply 101, 280, 580, etc, not titles nor entitled but simply an uncomplicated way to get from point a to point b.

A generation later the traffic is pretty intense in the Bay Area too and I haven’t heard anyone call this part of the state mellow in a long time.

I can’t begrudge other people moving here–after all, we did.

It was 7:30 and I was on my way to Purlescence. Past the one-time failed mall being taken apart, hundreds of trees down, the place raw and open, the rebuilding part not yet begun. Twenty-seven years of having that at the foot of the neighborhood and I’d never actually seen the sides of the place before but you sure can now.

I hit lots of green lights and things moved mostly steadily, rare at rush hour, to be rarer soon.

The moon was huge and full. Gentle light, unlike the painful intensity of the sun behind us, it was bright and white against the turquoise of the late sunlit summer sky, dancing a duet with the road, bouncing off the top of that pine, then that long tall redwood, always ahead and always on our side of the expressway. Those singing cartoons from my childhood with the bouncing ball jumping across the top of each word as it was sung so you could follow along (and maybe learn to read to the music)? Like that.  And so big it took up a lot of the view.

I came to the major intersection where two different large roads feed in from the sides and type A drivers are always trying to elbow ahead, always, always pushing to get past all these countless others in the way of them and their dinner and wheredidallthesepeoplecomefrom.

They’d had to drive down ramps that had them facing into that moon, too.

This time there was a nod and an aye for an aye, tooth for a tooth, smooth unhampered zippering all the way, not a single slamming of the brakes just a steady flowing together in the moon’s river.

Mellow.

I could only wonder if anyone else noticed that it had made their cars behave so well.

Sometimes all we really need is a silent moment in the presence of Nature.


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Fascinating. An entire continent between us, and the dogs and I admired the moon on our way back to the house after chatting with neighbors in the road for a while. Gretchen even let the two cockapoos from next door get within inches of her without flipping out!

Comment by Channon 07.11.14 @ 6:05 pm



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