Thoughts on Ramadan and the Korean Space Shuttle Lift tomorrow….

In my lowly and sick state, I never saw something so lovely as the crescent moon last night. I am not a Muslim, but when I decided to fast this morning , instead of eating breakfast, it was ironic.  When the clock slowly ticked past two o’clock, my tongue could not be staid on ginger tea spiked with orange juice any longer. Finally, I revived my appetite.

1.5 cups of grits

1/2 cup of cilantro

1 small avocado sliced

1 cup of chicken meat(warm)

 

Hot Green “Verde” Salsa

1 tablespoon butter

2 tablespoons bacon grease

4 large cloves of garlic

1/4  cup of finely chopped pablano peppers

1/4 finely chopped spanish onions

2 large tomatillos chopped

Heat  oils together and saute the garlic till soft and aromatic. Add peppers and saute for 1-2 minutes, till aromatic. Add onions and tomatillos. Stir then seal with a lid on low to medium heat for 5-15 minutes. Check to see if ingredients are very soft and cook down. If so, remove from heat and puree in a blender. Add water as necessary.

Place grits into a large mouth bowl. Place chicken in the center. Feather avacados around the outisde of the bowl flat on the grits. Drizzle or pour salsa around the chicken. heap around the outside of the bowl the cilantro. Serve with salt and pepper.

There is a better way to do this. But I couldn’t stop eating it. The bite of the tomatillos is first to the cilantro. It is the avocado that calms the palette and blends everything down. It was the salt I omitted for health consciousness. I also had sun brewed ice tea.

Although I never had astronomical fundamentals, in high school I helped a post-graduate student with his research finding space dust. My team found the most in the samples. I had looked up into the sky before: during dawn, late playground time around four and of course dusk and beyond. My earliest memory of knowing there was more than earth, was around age seven. I was out late playing at the top of street after the street lights came on. Looking behind me and up the hill, I was wondering why the sky was so bright. The sun, seemingly, had long gone down. It was the largest thing I had ever seen in the sky. I thought it would crash into the earth. “It can’t be the moon”, I said to myself. There is no way it should be the moon, you can see all of the nooks and crannies on that thing, wait a minute…. it’s a.. oh boy. Its an alien spaceship! All this as was an internal conversation. It was so quiet, no one was outside to share this special moment with me. That’s what I get for being out past curfew. I was confused, I don’t think we were do for a full moon yet that month.

So sad for me, I was alone. Not only did I have no one to corroborate my story, but no one to share this breathtaking moment with. The object moved from what my little eyes could tell and its size, as I realized, rivaled the horizon.

I rode the big wheel down the hill and went inside. I think I turned on the news. Go figure, a seven year old that watches the news and rates the news anchors. There was scuffle in their voices and apparently the whole city was disturbed as well. {In hindsight: You can’t explain what I saw as the air force doing maneuvers in the area or large weather balloons. What do you say? Is it the proverbial question that you are the President, there is a meteorite hurtling toward the earth, what do you do?] The reporters had no answers but many questions. There was a tempering in their voices like it was the end of the world.

To accelerate the story, the next day I stayed outside past curfew again and saw the object from a different angle. It was setting at the horizon line and beaming with gentle ambient white light.  It was smaller though.  Darn! I had hoped to see the surface even more. Somedays, once in a lifetime is exactly that. I parked my bike in the garage and hurtled up the stairs two by two.  After relieve d myself in the bathroom, I ran to the television and turned on the news. The reporters said not to worry, it wasn’t the end of the city or the earth, it was a blue moon. It comes around every now and some years or so. Whatever it was, I’d never forget.

Remembering is one thing, but lifetime obsession is another. It led to looking out for the harvest moon for the rest of my life;moon watching became a necessity. Then discovering  the lunar calendar and the thirteenth month cycle of life’s events was excitement that could not compare. Tycho Brahe and Copernicus only tipped the iceburg. Galileo, of what I knewm didn’t go far enough. Did you know that the moon was not written of till late in astronomical history. Some saw it never existed, but is a dislodged piece of the earth from an explosion early in man’s history (Zacharia Sitchens mentions it in his series, I checked for it at a college library).

By the way, The next blue moon I saw, was small and puny compared to what a pondered at age seven.

For the sizing and histories of the stars and heavenly bodies, how do you catalog and classify them? I’m thinking in terms of human existence. I know one could saw constellations and there corresponding stories. Still, there are so many, how do you give each significance and placement? Is there a DefCon classification for outerterran experience? I can joke about close encounters of the first, second, or third kind. Still, how do you put uncommon human experience into a common classification?