@palafo

When my daughter was 2, she loved the moon. She still loves the moon. “Luna!” she used to call it, after the character on “Bear in the Big Blue House.” I helped her to love the moon, by talking about it and playing music about it and buying her certain books and reading them over and over. She used to love Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon” and Eric Carle’s “Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me” in which a little girl’s daddy uses a very long ladder to climb into the sky to bring the moon down to earth. (Later she moved on to Tintin and his moon explorations, drawn by Hergé long before the real moonshots.)

We live in New York City, so it is often hard to see the moon. There are a lot of lights and a lot of buildings in the way, and while some people keep their toddlers up late in this city we used to put ours to bed before the sun even went down. But one day back in 2002 my wife was pushing her in the stroller to the library and our daughter was craning her neck at the sky and pointing, very excited. It was broad daylight. My wife looked up. The moon was out. Weird. But not so weird. It happens all the time. My daughter, who is now 8, still spots Luna, peeking around the side of a skyscraper, when I’m looking at the traffic or the sidewalk.

There’s something magical about the moon. We humans have always felt an affinity for it, that light in the sky. It has kept us company for centuries on lonely dark nights. Maybe we don’t think about it so much anymore in this country, now that we have electric lights and good roofs over our heads most of the time. But when I was a kid, it seemed like people talked about the moon all the time.
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