A Blue Moon to End the Summer

The first drinks: Blue Moon martinis.

It was a Blue Moon tonight, the first since New Year's Eve, 2009, and the last until July of 2015. Neil Armstrong, who died last Saturday, was memorialized today in Ohio, his home state. There is no way it was a coincidence that this happened on a Blue Moon, let alone a full moon. Sarah and I did what we always do for this infrequent occasion (the Blue Moon, not the memorial service): we prepared some blue food and blue drinks, put on a quartet of CDs I made many years ago for a Blue Moon party we held together shortly after our relationship began, and settled in for the evening. We had blue pasta and chicken and I mixed us some Blue Moon martinis at first, then we switched to Blue Lagoon cocktails for the rest of the evening. The CDs are a wonderful collection of songs with either the word "Blue" or the word "Moon" in the title, heavily leaning toward the latter. There's "Harvest Moon", "Blue Moon of Kentucky", "Moondance", "Claire de Lune". The Waterboys are represented, as are Echo and the Bunnymen, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and King Harvest. I have, on one of the disks, something like 17 different versions of "Blue Moon" alone. I only get these CDs out on the occasion of a Blue Moon which keeps the compilation "fresh" for the most part.

Neil Armstrong, Modern Pioneer

Neil Armstrong: First human on the moon

"Neil Armstrong was the spiritual repository of spacefaring dreams & ambitions. In death, a little bit of us all dies with him." *

My first hero died today at the age of 82.

As a little boy, all I ever wanted to be was an astronaut. I ravenously devoured every detail of every Apollo mission from Apollo 7 (the first manned mission) onward. When Apollo 8 orbited the moon at Christmastime, 1968, it was then -- and still is now -- one of the greatest thrills of my life and an uplifting end to an awful, awful year. I followed the docking mission of Apollo 9 and the oh-so-close orbit of Apollo 10, running home from school on many of those days to absorb as much of the dazzling story unfolding on my television as I could manage. And then came the summer of 1969.

"'Men Walk On Moon' - The only positive event in the last 50 yrs for which everyone remembers where they were when it happened."

Apollo 11 Mission Patch

As luck would have it, we were to be in the States that July, renting a cottage in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, for a couple of weeks beginning on the 19th. There was no television in that cottage, but fortunately my aunt and uncle and their daughters had rented another place not far from us with a tiny black and white t.v. in the living room. We were still in Toronto for the liftoff, on July 16, and I was glued to the television for much of that morning. The launch itself took place at 9:32 a.m. EDT, but I was watching hours earlier as Walter Cronkite described the mission particulars at great length. I simply could not get enough of that sort of thing back then. I followed the mission as best I could over the next day or so and then I was in a kind of "radio silence" as my family made the long trip to Maine by car. I picked up reports in dribs and drabs via whatever source was nearby until the afternoon of the 20th when we dropped in on my cousins to watch the actual landing.

It's Already August?

Addie enjoying some rare fresh air

Even though the heat of this summer has been nearly unbearable for me - and I spend so little of my day outside, but this computer room is crazy hot - it still seems incredible to me that it's going by so fast. It feels like the fireworks of Canada Day just happened! The truly odd thing is that, even though the air in Toronto has been stifling this summer, we've still managed to open the windows for Addie a couple of times each day, which is something we really didn't do last summer even though it was quite a bit cooler. Odder still, though, is the fact that Addie has recently shown signs of staying away from the open windows because it's too hot even for her. Tonight while I was out at a meeting, Sarah took Addie back out on the balcony to get some wind on her fur (Addie's, I mean) and let her walk around on the harness and leash for a while. We call this a "picnic" in homage to a wonderful Whiskas commercial of a year or so ago:

I love that it's a guy in that commercial with his cat; this is not a common theme for advertising and, as you can imagine, I can't get enough of this sort of thing.

Canada Day Hangover

The midway tonight at 8:30; these people do nothing fast

After all the sun and fun of Canada Day it was pretty hard to drag ourselves out of bed this morning, to be sure. But we had made a date with our friends Louise and Mike (the latter here on a very short visit from England) to have brunch with them at Flo's Diner in Yorkville. It was a special treat to be downtown early on a Holiday Monday because it seemed almost like a ghost town (Louise said she kept expecting to see zombies coming from around the corner). We got a great table outside under a huge umbrella and spent the better part of two hours with our wonderful friends. I'm really glad we were able to see them today, but let me tell you: it had to be a special occasion indeed to get us out of the apartment because we were absolutely zonked this morning.

Nora's Lists

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012

Two days ago the world lost Nora Ephron due to complications from the leukemia she had been battling for several years. I didn't know a great deal about her other than I enjoyed many of the movies she had written and/or directed over the years, but in scanning the myriad tributes to her over the past two days I have come to realize that she was looked up to and admired by women - and men who name themselves as feminists - the world over. I never gave much thought to the strong female leads of her movies, nor to the fact that she was a rare animal, a "woman director" in Hollywood; in my defence, it simply didn't seem "out of the ordinary" to me, not because I have my head in the sand but because when the social order starts to feel "right" to me I have a tendency to be soothed and not shocked by it. These tributes, appearing on such diverse online sites as The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor (Ms. Ephron was Jewish), are remarkable to read now, as fascinating and insightful as the incredible volume of tweets sent out over the same period of time lamenting her loss. She seems to have been a rather quiet hero, neither shrill nor obvious, just a woman who believed that women had been shortchanged forever and set out to subtly change the way of the world.

Woozy Weekend

Vertigo!

Click on the picture for cool facts about vertigo!

Late yesterday afternoon I suddenly developed a wicked case of vertigo, pretty much out of nowhere. I figured it was something simple such as pinching a blood vessel in my neck or perhaps just not enough sleep, but then last night my joints were sore as well. I went to bed hoping everything would take care of itself, but really only 50% of it did. My joints don't hurt today but the vertigo is still there and now it's accompanied by a left eye that simply won't stop running. I'm guessing now that it's some kind of a cold virus or perhaps low-grade infection in either my ear canal or (more likely) Eustachian tube on the left side of my head. Since there's no pain involved I'm going to wait on this for a day or so to see if it goes away on its own; I'm loathe to take up a doctor's time unless I think it could be really serious.

Full Moon Rising

I'll admit it. I am a lunatic. Although I mean it in the late Latin, lunaticus form of the word. For as far back as I can remember I have been profoundly affected by the waxing of the full moon, each and every month. No, I don't grow grotesque quantities of hair and suffer from an overpowering urge to slaughter lambs but I am affected nonetheless. I can usually tell you that it's the night before a full moon without looking at a calendar simply by the otherwise unexplainable surge of adrenaline in my body and sudden uplifting of my spirit.

I used to wonder, when I first worked out the cause of this phenomenon within me, whether that was the reason I was so fascinated by the Apollo program when I was a young boy. Perhaps it was the other way around, too, but I find it difficult to imagine that such an effect on my psyche would be "man-made" and not sublimely natural. In any event, I hung on every bit of information I could get about every single moon launch NASA ever made and all I wanted to do as a young man was become an astronaut. I now think this was not because I wanted to go into space (although that was certainly part of it); rather, it was more likely that I craved an opportunity to walk on the moon. (This would likely also explain why I never really paid that much attention to the Shuttle Program.)