Moonlight Madness
In my new life on this hilltop, I am acutely aware of moonlight for some reason. That strikes me as particularly funny because when I bought the house in 2012 and was searching for just the right name for it (something I had done for my other vacation homes that I cared most about), I came up with the name Casa Moonstruck. That name was intended to bring the Hispanic nature of the area and my own Hispanic heritage into play as well as my favorite movie of all time, starring Cher, Olympia Dukakis, Vincent Gardenia, Nicholas Cage and Danny Aeillo, Moonstruck. In that movie, there is a scene where the grandfather, who favors a retinue of mongrel dogs, takes them out for a walk into the brisk Brooklyn Heights air and tells them in Italian to howl at the moon. “Guarda la luna, que bella luna!” he tells the dogs and then leads them in howling at what Raymond Capomaggi (Cher’s uncle) calls Cosmo’s moon, in remembrance of the Vincent Gardenia character’s serenade of his sister (Olympia) those many years ago. That scene on the pier in Brooklyn and the reference to Cosmo’s moon is what gives the movie its name and its amazing and unique character. The movie was written by John Patrick Shanley, a writer from The Bronx, who brought us other great scripts including Doubt, Joe and the Volcano and Congo. For some reason, Shanley captured the inexplicable power of moonlight from a full moon in a way that everyone inherently understands and yet probably cannot explain. It makes us aware of life to the fullest and maybe makes us just a little bit crazy. We are all subject to becoming Moonstruck at times.
Right this moment I am definitely Moonstruck for some reason. Usually when I go to bed, especially after a night when I only got five hours or so of sleep because the moon woke me up and kept me up for two hours in the middle of the night, my head is eager for sleep and I at least get four hours before waking up. Tonight was different. First of all, Kim and I discussed the full moon of the prior night. Then, I uncharacteristically could not fall asleep and got up and went into the bathroom only to realize in a moment that it was almost bright enough out from the moonshine, to be daylight. It is a cloudless and dry night and that damn moon is making me crazy and unable to sleep.
I generally understand the things that cause me to lose sleep, but I have no particular stress at the moment. I have no calls or specific acts that need doing tomorrow (now officially today). I am not upset about any family or financial issues. All is generally well and Kim and I are generally well and in good health, When we discussed our weeks, neither of us had anything in particular that was pressing on us for tomorrow. In other words, there is no reason for any mental agitation that should cause me to be sleepless. And yet, here I am, unable to fall asleep and doing exactly what I should not do, which is stimulating myself into starting and hurtling through another largely meaningless storytelling exercise that I have refined into a 1,300 word per day habit for my blog. I already am three days ahead on my blog posts, so even that chore (I call it a chore, but I love writing my stories) is not pressing on me other than deciding whether a new story deserves to be moved up in the queue for reasons of timeliness. For instance, while the full moon will have passed in three day’s time, I think a story about getting a little crazy under the full moon is a pretty timeless story which I need not advance in the queue.
The story of Moonstruck, while quaint and poignant, is hardly earth shattering. It does not seek to plumb the depths of the human soul the way Doubt does. It does not describe a societal condition that rests heavily on mankind the way it does in Joe and the Volcano. It tells a simple story of life, love and family (a la familia!) in a very funny context that all takes place on an ordinary street in an ordinary house. There is a great line spoken by the randomly angry and anguished Nicholas Cage, who howls at the moon, “I’m no friggin’ monument to justice…I lost my hand!” since he lost his hand and his fiancé to a bread slicer even though he bakes bread for a living and “bread is life”. What a strange and obtuse soliloquy and yet, it is totally understandable to an audience that has just met Ronnie Cammareri, the one-handed baker. This is the Moonstruck madness that pervades us all at times and the only solution is the one that Cher gives to Ronnie when she slaps him, “Snap out of it!”
Eventually we all do snap out of it. Moonlight Madness is only a fleeting phenomenon to the best of my understanding. I know that lunacy and the epistemological basis for that condition is the impact that the insane or mentally disturbed seem to get from the full moon. We have all heard that emergency rooms are all overcrowded on nights of the full moon. So this is far more than the quaint dithering of a scriptwriter from The Bronx or a sleepless guy in Escondido. The moon does things to the world that we barely understand. It moves the very tides and it has moved an entire nation of my youth in its quest for exploration of the heavens. We are all, ultimately, in search of meaning in this life and looking to the moon seems a favorite venue for pondering.
When I painted a large boulder to the South of my house several months ago, a boulder that stands as a backdrop to a newly planted rose garden (one that, I beg your pardon, I never promised to Kim, but nonetheless planted), I felt the inconvenient urge to paint a full moon on a balanced round boulder wedged in between the others above the artistic giant agave I had painted. It was inconvenient because, unlike the agave, which I was able to reach up on my tiptoes to reach to the top of, the rock for the moon was set fifteen feet above the ground, as high as any self-respecting moon would find itself. The only way to reach it was with a 20-foot extension ladder. As you might imagine, me on a 20-foot extension ladder is a questionable and somewhat illogical activity, but I was driven to paint that damn full moon on that high boulder. So, I did it nonetheless and there sits the full yellow Cosmo’s moon on the back hillside of Casa Moonstruck.
The agave is somewhat artistically interesting in its abstract yet recognizable form, but the moon is not particularly interesting or special even though I did try to use some grey spray paint to fashion the lunar landscape that is visible even to the human eye on a full moon. It just didn’t do the full moon justice, probably because the qualities that make the full moon so special are more ephemeral and impossible to capture. As Mother Superior sings about Maria, “How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?” Well I say, “How do you capture a full moon on a high boulder?” The answer is, you can’t. And I didn’t very well. But I did try, and that is the Moonstruck moral. We must all follow our Moonlight Madness some times (assuming we can’t just “snap out of it!”). And with that, I may just be tired enough now to sleep and perchance to dream of my next moonrise.