Decades pass while one is only briefly away from something essential, part of one’s identity from such an early age that he instinctively says, “I do that,” although he hasn’t for decades, because he can step up any time and resume that role.
Two years ago when we moved into a new house nearby a golf course I thought, sure, I’ll be going there very soon, but with family responsibilities, opportune times for a selfish activity are few.
More days than not I pass that golf course, wondering when I’ll get there.
After decades, doubt nags– can I even golf any more?
As a youth, I could go out onto the course with no doubts that I belonged there, with brothers and friends there to join in the triumphs and disappointments. But going out onto the course alone, with the sore arms and weary legs of a much older man, I wondered if I could still have an experience that wouldn’t be an embarrassment.
When we sell our condo, I proclaimed, I’ll go golfing the very next weekend.
The day came, cold and rainy, awake at 6:00 to drink coffee and get to the course shortly after it opened at 7:00 for the cheap rates available for the back 9 on the first hour open Sunday.
At the driving range, I couldn’t even follow the shots from my driver yesterday. Would I even be able to find my golf ball off the tee? Is the rain going to start falling harder?
I don’t think I even have any tees, I thought, as I walked to the 10th hole. But people leave their tees in the ground, I saw, so that wasn’t a problem.
The fairway was wide, so even if I sliced my tee shot, I might still stay in the fairway, but my first shot scattered off to the left anyway. Exultant anyway, off I marched toward my second shot.
Later in the day, I noticed the scorecard has a map on the back. Had I seen that, I would have known I was on the 11th hole, not the 18th, as it seemed.
For every ball I lost– I lost two– I found two more balls, all four in fairways.
Better to play good golf with a few clubs than play bad golf with many clubs. But honor dictates that one use his driver, because one should have a complete game. Drive off the tee, use a putter only on the green.
Standing at the tee, staring down a long fairway, not able to see the green, a golfer only gets one chance to hit that tee shot on that hole during that round on that day. A lot can go wrong– the shot isn’t likely to be perfectly straight, or go as far as one would like, but one has to play the long game and one has to play the short game.
Sometimes one plays the shots he thinks he should play. Sometimes one plays the shots he wants to play.
Once you’re on the course, you are committed to the game, to playing the course to the best of your abilities, in sportsmanlike fashion.
To golf well is to have passed a few hours of one’s life living well.

All Saints, and All Souls. A uniquely provocative pairing at an odd time of the year– November.
October is the stormy transition from Summer to Autumn, and next month will be Winter, but for now we’re in the middle of unambiguously Autumnesque short, dark days and rainfall.
The backyard has become an unfamiliar place. Odd green growths are bursting out everywhere, including a lot of things that need to be kept under control immediately before weeding after the turn of the year will become a vast headache. But that stuff out there isn’t much seen because so much of the time the cold rain and wind are such that I’d rather stay inside until the weather’s a bit more hospitable, though that’s a long wait.
Decades ago I found a box and wrapped it in tin foil, and put some dead plants and rocks in it, put it in a corner where a window shone on it, and named it the “November Sky Garden.” It got dusty and was eventually discarded when I moved somewhere else, but I’ve remembered it. Its legacy is that I think of November skies as the most exotic of skies. Outside, I look up and admire how dramatic the November sky is, cloudy or clear.
The month with the most exotic skies is a month to really enjoy, especially when it’s not October, and it’s not the stressful month of December. All we have to worry about in November is Thanksgiving.
All Saints day is popularly taken as a day to celebrate the unofficial saints, living saints, whoever they may be. And why they might be saints. If we are not saints officially, or saintly all the time, we have our moments when we rise to difficult occasions and acquit ourselves well, in accord with our highest expectations and responsibilities.
A poem says, “I constantly need to be reminded of my own higher knowledge.” The inner voice speaks up. and, instead of screaming, we smile.
All Souls is an enigma of a feast day. Humans are created in the image of God, eternal beings, eternal souls, each with a spark of divinity.
“Why attempt to purify that which has never been defiled?” said Huang Po (“The Zen Teaching Of Huang Po”).
Yet, as we especially remember in November, Purgatory is a place many of us will go.

Fall is everybody’s favorite time of year, so it seemed, decades ago, to a young person, who thought, who could be so shallow as to choose any other time of year?
Autumn is dramatic, as is life, and moody, as is anyone beset with troubles from the earliest age.
Summer is gone with its wearisome abundance of heat, light, and cheer, and the monotony of Winter recommends itself but little. Spring has its irrepressible, unquenchable vigor, but Autumn will come, with the wisdom of another year of disappointments, with the empathy cold, dark, rain, and wind have for a weary soul.
As a teenager, a then-obscure singing group released their second album and called it “October,” lending further cachet to this month.
By a certain age, a well-rounded person might have at some point preferred each season as his favorite.
Winter, when everything begins. Spring, joy and innocence. Summer, long days outside with little ones. Fall, with its majestic tumult of the psyche.
Winter, with Christmas, and New Year’s. Spring, with St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter. Summer, with July 4th and Labor Day. Autumn– Halloween!
Jesus spent a lot of time exorcising demons. It’s a full-time job, combating the forces of darkness within us, the selfish, anti-social, self-destructive anger within us, always afraid that someday the fuse that is forever being lit won’t be extinguished in time, and havoc will ensue.
Within ourselves, a lot of traffic goes back and forth between our good sides and our bad sides, the subconscious and the conscious. Intuitively, it’s easy to believe that we are surrounded by invisible legions of spirits who have gone before us, who watch over us, who threaten us, who intervene for us, who rejoice when we fall. We haven’t slit our wrists yet, and that’s a relief, but maybe someday we’ll be pushed too far, and we will, and that’s genuinely scary. That’s the dynamic of the holiday, and the season.
Happy Halloween!

Tough times for Catholics, this week.
When will Pope Francis do something of substance, some of us have wondered. Gestures are fine, but one good cop against a background of a bureaucracy full of bad cops seems disingenuous.
Then we had this past week’s rumors that a Vatican synod of bishops, meeting to discuss family issues, was on the verge of issuing a statement welcoming homosexuals as people with gifts to bring to the Church (like everyone else, I add), as people who benefited from their romantic relationships.
It wasn’t hard to predict how that would be received. Instead of all that, the bishops suggest that we treat homosexuals with respect and sensitivity.
When Christians have to be told to start treating other people with respect and sensitivity, as opposed to how we have treated certain people up to this point, we must have sunk really low.
The bishops did, however, include language that is shocking– that civil heterosexual unions outside the Church contain positive elements.
One hesitates to take this to the logical conclusion, which is, have we been supposed to have been thinking that a Catholic marriage is the only type of marriage that contains anything good at all? Such unbridled arrogance and condescension is absolutely insane.
Read your catechism, someone might say. That’s not what the Church teaches. Well, I really hope not! But there it is in the newspaper, and that’s what people will think, so, mortifying though it is, we have to deal with it on this level.
It’s hard to imagine that someone could be found who would say those things, but when people are running scared and looking over their shoulders at narrow-minded watchdogs who will leap for the jugular at the slightest sign of weakness, people will say crazy things just to get the hounds off their backs.
It’s easy to capitulate to the experts. “They’re the experts, those bishops and cardinals and priests,” we shrug. “We can’t argue with them, and it’s nice that we always know what they’re going to say about situations that, if one really thought about them, could get confusing.”
We used to sing the song, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
That’s a promising idea, but it’s vague. Love of God, do they mean? If it’s love of God, then maybe we should show that by being super faithful to the Church and following all the directions from the clergy. Or not.
Love of each other, do they mean? Sometimes we have to practice tough love. We can’t just smile and go along with everybody all the time. We have to be able to say, “You are wrong in your ideas and beliefs, and you need to straighten up or face the consequences.” That’s something everyone has to do some times.
Maybe a different type of love is meant, a type of love that expresses itself in solidarity and support with all types of people, because we all need solidarity and support, and if we were disqualified from that by our moral failings, why did we ever bother to sing that song?
Sexual immorality is not a comfortable subject. The Church simplifies it by differentiating between heterosexuality and “intrinsically disordered” homosexuality, which implies an unequal playing field slanted in favor of heterosexuals, but like any type of sexuality, heterosexuality is the orientation of people who are otherwise compromised by any number and variety of moral failures.
We have our religious leaders who take upon themselves the burden of adjudicating the relative seriousness of various types of sin, but as a layperson, I’m glad it’s not for me to decide who– the advocate of the death penalty, the soldier, the banker, the high-salaried CEO, the heterosexual who occasionally looks at porn, the stealer of office supplies, the homosexual– is in the more or less serious state of sin.

“My dear madam!” huffed the gentleman. “This is an outrage!”
Another type of tantrum is to pick up the first hefty thing in sight and throw it against a wall, breaking the thing and damaging the wall.
“There is that deadly sin of anger!” observers will disapprove, quietly so the angry person won’t hear.
God’s purposes are never served by anger, we say. “Anger management” has become a common theme, as anger has always been a common phenomenon.
People often try to explain a tantrum away by explaining why they were so upset. It was just how they expressed it that was regrettable, but they were right to be angry, they suggest.
You can count to ten before you say something, or do something, but when you’re really mad, there’s no counting to ten because if you wait that long to react, people won’t appreciate how angry you are.
Never go to bed angry with your spouse, people say, but what’s the point of having a discussion in which you’re not going to prevail? Better to keep quiet and allow the anger to fade, because it isn’t always something that can be talked away.
Some people are just born angry. Someone can be having a decent day, but someone accidentally gets in his way at the grocery store, and, angrily, he says, “Excuse me!” and, as thoughts of revenge race through his mind, he looks fiercely back at the other person, who is baffled and scared, and simply wants to get away from this psycho who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, capable of who knows what.
Anger can be a bad thing that will ruin your day for no good reason. When that happens, obviously there’s a problem, and the person needs to learn to not think so much of himself and not take things so seriously.
But if someone steals your lunch out of the work refrigerator, of course you’ll be angry, because that’s not right, and the thief shouldn’t have done that, although it’s not likely to stop because the thief probably won’t be caught, and it’s probably not the case that the thief is a poor person temporarily in such straits that he needs to steal lunch, and when the thief’s situation improves, he’ll make up for it tenfold? Yeah… no. There are people who just like to steal lunches, and if you work with such a person, of course you get angry when your lunch is stolen.
The natural response to injustice is anger.
Jesus called James and John “sons of thunder.” I imagine they made a habit of expressing themselves forcefully. Paul routinely called his followers “fools” and addressed them in blistering terms.
Jesus too had angry words for his listeners.
God is repeatedly described as a God of anger and wrath.
A bird has to fly. A cloud has to rain. The Sun has to shine. The tide has to rise. A pot of water on a fire has to boil, and the way things are sometimes, for better or worse, try as hard as we can to avoid it, sometimes, a guy has to get angry.

Between the Stone Age and the 21st Century, where do the New Testament characters fit in?
These people seem incomprehensible. How could they not provide a physical description of Jesus?
Even Luke, after going over the whole story, through all the written accounts, didn’t. If only Theophilus would have said, “Be sure to include exactly what Jesus looked like– hair, eye color, nose, chin, all that.”
Instead, we have the bizarre world of renderings of Jesus we could call “Jesus Classic,” “Radical Jesus,” “Ethnic Jesus,” “Hippie Jesus.” There’s probably a Wall Street Jesus bobblehead out there. He could have been bald, and we can’t be sure John didn’t say, “Nobody cares about that stuff.”
I routinely wonder, what did the New Testament folk wear? How did they live? What did they eat?
Paul was a tent maker, he says. So he was like an REI employee? That doesn’t seem right.
James and John, Andrew and Peter: fishermen. How big were their boats? What kind of fish did they catch? Did they have a little shop where they shouted chants and threw fish to each other to the delight of the ladies? Doubt it.
The obvious facts of their lives are mysterious. Even more so, their writing.
Yet, theologians tell us how each of the four Gospels was carefully crafted for particular audiences with particular approaches to Judaism and religion that the writers had to work within so that the Gospel would be favorably received.
We have to figure, these were sophisticated people who could walk into our houses and, tidied up and given the right clothes, they’d have the computer booted up, heat up food in the microwave and be right at home, driving our minivans on the freeway, stereos blaring hip-hop, in no time.
Today’s Sunday readings include an excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. He mentions the peace of God that will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Peace has been on my mind this week, since the feast of St. Francis of Assisi was yesterday. That day always includes meditation on his famous prayer, which includes the petition, “Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace,” which sounds nice, but it’s not so easy when one is engaged in hostile circumstances instigated by an antagonist who, naturally, needs to be confronted and opposed, so one stands up to him, words are exchanged, enmity is established, and some sort of truce is established. No instrument of peace was involved. Later, one repents, and wishes he had attempted to interact from the perspective of “Gospel values.” But that requires creativity, which is hard to muster in circumstances that, instinctively, crave boisterous histrionics.
To have peace in our hearts, then, is an ideal we are to pursue. But what did Paul (and Jesus) mean by that?
What they meant exactly, I daresay, is less important than how can we interpret that concept in a way meaningful to our modern take on the elements of a human person.
“Heart” is differentiated from “mind,” “body” and “soul.”
“Soul” is most useful as a literary device. If 35 people are killed in a bus crash, the sensitive journalist will write, “There were 35 souls aboard that bus.”
A body wracked with pain is a body in anguish, not a body at peace, but physical suffering is altogether different than emotional, mental, psychological pain. The mind can be at peace, though the body suffers.
So can the heart be at peace while the mind (and body) suffer.
While the mind is afflicted with doubts, the heart can remain in the right place, the heart that belongs to Jesus. That is the heart that responds to the Gospel, that, though the mind be distracted, and emotions run this way, that way, every which way, and the soul be troubled to the point of failing, the heart can remain the center of gravity, the faithful witness to one’s innermost wishes, desires, and intentions, and that constancy is peace.

Goodbye, Mariners. Their season ends today, the first Sunday of Autumn. Thanks to manager Lloyd McClendon, his staff, and the Mariners players for the best baseball season in Seattle in a long time! Today’s game had a playoff feel to it. Had the A’s lost, with a Mariners win, the two teams would have played a one-game playoff tomorrow. One game does not make a playoff series, of course, but the general public is sold on this one-game format as a legitimate playoff.
The week before this last week saw our last temperatures as high as 80. This last week could have had our last temperatures in the 70s. Autumn comes as quick as that. September has Summer days. Beginning the month, September seems firmly in the category of Summer, but by month’s end– especially after four straight days of rain, and sunsets before 7:00– Autumn is here.
Ever been stuck next to a born-again, evangelical Christian on a broken down bus? Happened to me last week. On a bus, strangers generally don’t talk to each other, but if someone does talk to me, I try to take it in the spirit intended, and try to be open-minded, try to be mindful that this might be more interesting than the average bus ride, which isn’t interesting, and of which I have had thousands, and will have thousands more, although I might never again sit next to someone who will ask, “How’s your day been? What book are you reading these days?” (John Muir’s “The Yosemite,” which is very good. He scrambled under, over, and around everything– small and big, and expertly knew his trees, mountains, and geological formations, conveyed with abundant wit and accomplished descriptive narrative and literary skills).
I explained the book a bit. He said, “God’s creation is a wonderful thing!” He took a slim book out of his briefcase and laid it on top of it, holding a yellow highlighter pen, as if he wished to convey that he was reading this book, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to open it just then– “God Has A Wonderful Plan For Your Life,” by Ray Comfort, with a fragment of a painting on the front depicting, I’m almost positive, the stoning of St. Steven. Not exactly Kierkegaard, or Schillebeeckx.
“What are you reading?” I asked, thinking it would be polite to ask him the question I thought he might be fervently praying that I would ask him. And I hoped I would be able to hold my own in any conversation that might result, though I certainly didn’t expect that the bus would break down, and he and I would hold our ensuing (politely quiet) conversation in the back of an eerily quiet bus weighty with the suspense of a busload of people in anticipation of learning what was wrong with our bus and what would happen next by way of our getting on with our trips.
My new friend told me that, out of the Ten Commandments, he would just tell me about the first four, all of which he had broken, and he had broken all ten, so that made him guilty. I had to say– a person doesn’t have lust in his heart just because he looks at a woman with desire. If he had a bad intent and would act on it given the chance, that’s different, but is that the treasure in my new friend’s heart? Or is that treasure rather his knowledge that he might struggle against the temptation, but he would do the right thing instead? If he had to choose between “sin” and “don’t sin,” wouldn’t he choose “don’t sin?” Okay then. Innocent, I say!
“Here we are, stuck on this bus, and we’re not at each others’ throats,” he said. “That’s because God’s law is in our hearts!”
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Jesus. Much is made of this, but rarely does one encounter someone who has anything interesting to say on that. My friend thinks it means accepting Jesus as Saviour, as Christ, and if you don’t, forget about going to the Father. Forget about going to Heaven. You’re going to Hell. My dismay is in thinking, is God that easy to figure out?
I wish I had a really good rebuttal to that to bring back down to Earth people who are so smug in the idea that a little lip service to a simple, bookbound Jesus is their ticket out of doubt and into all tomorrow’s parties in the afterlife. I hope my new friend isn’t that simpleminded. Maybe that’s just how he explains it, because he thinks anything deeper would go over his audience’s head.
My thinking is that, “No one comes to the Father except through Me” has a lot to do with that last “Me.” Jesus refers to Himself as a subjective person, “I,” an individual, in relation to the Father. I can identify myself too as “me” versus “you,” an “I” in relation to my/our Father, Who is my creator, creator of us all.
Perhaps Jesus means not, “Come to the Father through Me” in a way that is different from the way a person naturally comes to the Father. Perhaps He is asserting a level of kinship between the way He comes to the Father and the way we all naturally come to the Father– the simple, intuitive recognition of a common origin of our species.
Although Jesus the Christ is “the Way” to the Father for His people, inasmuch as He is the Savior, the Alpha and the Omega, He Who is the “Yes” to God’s promises of salvation for His people, and “the truth,” the revelation of God in His Son.
“Look!” my friend said. “We’re next to a church (Calvary Christian Assembly on Roosevelt)! How cool is that?”
We had to wait for the next bus to come, complicated by our being on a Sound Transit bus, not on a much commoner Metro bus. As many of us as could fit got onto the next bus. Had I known not all of us could transfer over, I would have let someone else go instead of me, because I wasn’t in a hurry. After that, I don’t know what happened.
One never does get all the answers.

So much for the feast day of my primary patron saint, St. Matthew– so little.
It fell on a Sunday, but the USCCB readings for the day didn’t have the headline it often has citing the saint(s) of the day. The readings didn’t have anything to do with St. Matthew, though one supposes that any of the typical Gospel readings for Matthew’s day could have been used.
I went to Mass at a St. Matthew’s church, for the first time, expecting some ceremony. Even there, they didn’t use a reading that included Matthew. The priest told the congregation that, if they wondered why he was wearing red, it was because it was the feast day of Matthew. A few rows up, someone said, “Hm!”
No mention of it in the bulletin, or in the sermon.
“Hm!” That’s all St. Matthew got.
I googled around some to see if I could quickly find out if this feast day was a major celebration anywhere. Nothing turned up.
Hm!
In 1600, Caravaggio painted “The Martyrdom Of St. Matthew.” He also painted “The Calling Of St. Matthew” and “The Inspiration Of St. Matthew,” all now in the church of San Luigi dei Francesci in Rome.
Hm!
He did write a Gospel, after all– as the Table Of Contents goes, the beginning of the New Testament.
Hm!
And the world has had plenty of Matthews.
I found out what the legend has.
Matthew traveled to Ethiopia, where he found a kingdom in thrall of magicians. He preached against them, and converted many, including Ephigenia (same feast day), who founded a convent of 200 nuns.
Hm!
The King wanted to marry Ephigenia, and asked Matthew’s help.
Hm!
Matthew invited him to Mass. He preached about the excellence of marriage, to the encouragement of the king, then Matthew twisted this into an attack against a king who would dare try to tamper with the marriage of Ephigenia and Jesus.
Hm!
The king sent a soldier to kill Matthew, and his soldiers tried to burn down the church, but Matthew appeared and redirected the fire against the king’s castle, and only the king and his son survived.
In the future, Ethiopian food for the last day of Summer, the feast of St. Matthew, will be a good idea. You use the injera bread to scoop up the rest of the food.
Hm!
Others might prefer Italian, or the exotic Israeli couscous.
Hm!
Bankers might reflect on the life of their patron, and reflect on how a bank might help not the “well,” but the “sick.”
Hm!

Summer’s heat, Autumn’s light: overlap, as we multitask, two steps forward, one step back, two steps back, one step forward, as we tread water and eye the shore, not sure if the trees we see are the trees we saw before we went under and surfaced last time, selfless for our loved ones, selfish for our selves.
“Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, Whose service is never furthered through the Top Seven Deadly Sin of anger.
If someone says, “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing,” they snicker, the self-styled learned, who wouldn’t recognize a man without guile if Jesus Himself pointed out such a person.
A victim wants justice, and that will almost always include ostensible harm to the perpetrator, who will then point the finger all around in accusation that the victim merely sought revenge.
When one has forgiven someone, and taken much credit over many years for that maturest of actions, one can be quick to accuse one’s self of a secret desire for revenge, so secret that he himself hadn’t even been aware that it had lurked in his depths for decades.
Then trouble comes, and the old sibling patterns assert themselves, and the junior of the old pattern realizes he now has the upper hand, and needn’t relive the toxic episodes of the past. He swiftly and brutally, with no preamble, cuts off the head of the snake, before the other person knows what happened.
The explanation quickest to hand is that this is his long-awaited revenge.
It was a switching of roles: the balance of power had shifted, and the younger no longer had to suffer at the hands of the older.
The older had to understand that the old relationship was over. As equals, the younger no longer had to endure the drunken abuse and fights. He could simply walk away, and leave the other to wonder why everything had changed, and he was no longer welcome in the society of the younger and his family.
Someone who was powerless had wanted revenge, but that person, much older, hadn’t wanted revenge. He wanted compassion, understanding, peace, wisdom, and understood that the sudden, ugly turn of events might look like revenge, but it was more complicated than that.
He wanted people to grow, and wanted to help that along, but he could only do so much.
Vengeance is God’s, as is mercy, and forgiveness.
The “vengeance” of God? A figure of speech. God’s way of saying, “You want your enemies to suffer? Maybe they will, but I will decide what happens, and that may very well seem like vengeance to you.”
Jesus advises us to settle with our enemies on our way to court, because the judge just might side with our opponents, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Turn the other cheek. The first will be the last.
Why not decide for ourselves what is right?
Justice, vengeance, compassion, mercy, selflessness, selfishness: like Summer heat and Autumn light, our younger selves and present-day selves inevitably, and sometimes uncomfortably, through the darkest of glass, overlap.

We are stardust, this week, under a Harvest Moon.
As I researched the dates of a long-ago year’s full moons, I learned that each month’s moon has a name.
This made immediate sense to me, a long-time admirer of Nashville’s Jason and The Scorchers and their song, “Under A Harvest Moon.”
Why September tomatoes and blackberries seem sweetest, why farmers markets in September seem most complete, why the Washington State Fair in Puyallup with its agricultural displays and baking contests are left to September: the Harvest Moon.
But each month has not one name, but many names, conferred by myriad, far-flung peoples.
The Inuit might not feel any resonance at all from the full moon of September.
An Irishman might call the March full moon Pat’s Moon, while readers of farmers almanacs call it the Worm Moon.
Once, I called the January moon the Clam Chowder Moon, probably because I needed to think of a name fast for an arts & crafts project so I went with that. Water Moon would be a better name. “God’s Spirit hovered over the waters,” says the beginning of Genesis. The almanacs list it as the Wolf Moon.
February is listed as the Snow Moon. I called it Potato Moon. Now, I call it Skunk Moon in honor of the florid and flamboyant skunk cabbages that pierce the muddy miasmas of wetlands toward the end of the middle of Winter.
March they call Worm Moon. I called it Pizza Moon. Why not Still Moon to honor the distilleries that brew the spirits we enjoy on festive occasions such as St. Patrick’s Day?
April: Hot Dog Moon? Any month could be Hot Dog Moon. Pink Moon is nice. The Chills did a song, “Rolling Moon,” on a CD that includes “Rolling Moon.” Okay? Rolling Moon it is!
To be a child served a dish with rice pilaf and shape that rice into a perfect moon shape is a sublime memory. In Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, she discourses frequently on the Moon’s power to waken memories of the pleasantest and melancholiest sort. May could be Rice Moon, or Flower Moon, if one feels pastoral in the bucolic English sense.
Only one month rhymes with Moon, so June Moon is worth considering. But a million big and tiny insects take that notion and amend it to Junebug Moon. Another type of bug is the jitterbug, a dance people do late at night during summertime parties that last all through the soft, fragrant summer nights. Jitterbug Moon then, although this might be one of the names with lesser staying power.
July has the Buck Moon. As in, 4th of July fireworks that give you more bang for the buck? No, deer. Maybe this one should be the Ice Cream Moon. Flag Moon? Trout Moon? August, in one telling, is the Sturgeon Moon, so, as if such a thing is even possible, I say, “Too many fish.” For years, some one I know has called it Grapefruit Moon. Who can improve on that? I don’t see any raised hands out there, at least none I care to call on.
Sometimes in August, the heat builds up so ridiculously in an upstairs, non air-conditioned apartment that one must flee to the shade of the tall trees of a nearby cemetery. While there, I’d have lunch, including a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Peanut Butter And Jelly Moon will remind us of the crappy apartments of our youth, but there will be no such thing because the fish need a moon, and they have the Sturgeon Moon of August.
Give up on your gardens, everybody– it’s about to get cold and wet. Those green tomatoes aren’t turning red. Who knows what’s up with that tomatillo plant that sprouted dozens of blossoms months ago, but those haven’t gone anywhere. Remember those corn plants? The squash, the zucchini, the bok choy, the chard? Better luck next year, hapless, half-hearted gardeners. Maybe we should call it the Sushi Moon.
October has been listed as the Hunters Moon. In that vein, maybe Slayer (as in Buffy The Vampire Slayer) Moon.
Witch Moon is persuasive. Pumpkin Moon. Black Cat Moon. Black Moon…. That could be a keeper.
The books faithfully list November as the month of the Beaver Moon. So as long as we’re coming completely from way out in left field, why not Puppy Moon? We have the dog days of Summer. Astronaut Moon? Soul Moon? Bleak Moon? College Moon? Monsoon Moon? Mons Moon it is!
The Cold Moon is the final official moon. Captain Kirk met many characters in his travels, and of all the souls he met, Mr. Spock’s, he said, was the “most human.” If Jesus told Mr. Spock, “Fear not!” Mr. Spock would honestly say, “I do not.” In December, we sing “Auld Lang Syne,” and hope that all people will live long and prosper. December’s would make the best “Spock Moon.”
In the book, Owl At Home, Owl addresses the moon: “What a good, round friend you are!”
Indeed!