On the Moon

Space in five minutes, a wrangling of my thoughts is cowboy-style, lariat and spiked spurs about my boots. There was once a Mexican artist, a real vaquero, who lived in the very attic room you horsed down loaves of baguette and watched every Criterion film you could wrangle, Wild Strawberries, Strawberry Fields forever!

His black and whites of the Mexican cowboy’s ideal, stark, silver-gelatin sheets and beyond any of the other virtuosity I saw in this town chockfull of artists. His unframed photo’s lined the dormered walls, on their sides in green shag, one of a breast-budding girl in the thick chalk of mud and brick casa, rolling tortillas, the finished white and round as laid before her, full moons.

I was one of these as a child, middle-school-aged I think, that went home to report the moon landing had been bogus, a fraud of governmental propaganda, the Principal of the school, pock-scarred face reminding me of chocolate-chip cookie-dough and old dust.

How could so many be duped, I bucked?

I went home to report my anti-stance to my whinnying parents.

“Well, Kim, don’t you know that uncle Theral was one of these head’s,
a scientist for the Apollo moon landing?

No! And, why as a child was I never told?

I read his biography, really a Mormon, oral history and what stood out was the section detailing New Mexico lawn parties, the Manhattan project, how as a good religious man, bestowed with the power of priesthood, my relative had dramatically rejected the Russian’s vodka at the landing party.

But, mostly, what orbited me, was the part in which he wrote of little Jimmy and how he’d been offered beer while playing a round of croquet and my uncle hypothesized how his rock-star death had been caused by his father’s insistence on parties—brazenly rejecting the words of wisdom.

His last name was Morrison, but even though my family had known of project-moon, not a one had read all of his words and figured out it was Jimmy of The Doors, that James’ unapproving, admiral-father had been my uncle’s honorary best-man, on the lawn, outside of the locked temple-doored wedding, a soiree stomped out on the green of chemically-perfected grasses.

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Photo Credit: Creative Commons images/urdupoint.com "The 'man In The Moon' Illusion Is Caused By Lunar Swirls."