Moonrise Madneess
It’s 5:30pm and I am enjoying a long-overdue hot tub soak. I’m not sure why I don’t go in whenever I want, but I have a system now where the tub filter goes on every day at 1pm and circulates until 4pm. If I want to go in and I want it warmer than ambient air temperature, I have to hit a toggle on my cell phone app, It can’t really get much easier than that, can it? There will likely be a day when I can just think about it and it will happen. Our cars have some degree of anticipatory AI in them already, so its probably not far off. When I set up this protocol it was closer to the winter solstice and I would likely have gotten out by 4pm, but now sunset is at 5:30pm and its not unusual for me to go in later. So, tonight I am looking up at a lovely Waxing Gibbous moon. We are 4 days away from the next full moon, which, in February, is called the Snow Moon. That’s an interesting name for around here where it reached 85 degrees today…and dry as a bone thanks to those Santa Ana winds coming down from the mountains.
I have been waking up regularly in the middle of the night and needing to take a few Extra-Strength Tylenols to soothe my aching body so that I can get back to sleep. Lately it has taken me anywhere from 30-60 minutes to get back to feeling drowsy and wanting to climb back into bed. I don’t really get up to pee, though I do take advantage of the moment. I don’t really get up due to anxiety or some troubling issue or other. That’s not so say that I don’t have issues and problems that plague me a bit, its just that they have not been overwhelming me especially as of late. Mostly it has been body aches from all the hobbit House building and before that the back hillside mulching. I’ve always thought that exercising led to sounder sleep, but there is clearly a diminishing returns concept at play as well and at my age its not so hard to exceed the limits of what these old muscles and joints are used to taking on. And as much as lying down at night seems relaxing at first, it doesn’t take very long for the stiffening process to take hold and for the discomfort of lying down to set in.
I might add that dryness is also a contributor to sleeplessness since despite my CPAP being one with a humidifier, that nose mask can start to feel pretty harsh during a particularly dry spell like we are having. Between email reading and solitaire playing I seem to be straddling the wall between bad stimulating activity and good soothing “sheep-counting” activity
There is no doubt that I notice the wakefulness phenomenon more when the moon is full or getting full. That might just be my imagination or the fact that the bathroom gets all lighted up by the moonbeams. The times I usually am up are when the moon is more in the Western than Eastern sky and our big picture window over the bathtub lets that moon shine in and make it feel like midday on those nights. It is one of the reason I like our choice of name for this house, Casa Moonstruck. Truth be told it had mostly to do with the great Cher movie by that name, and the fact that the movie ends with the refrain of “Ala familia!”, which feels both so very Italian and so very universal for a home that I want to be the center of my life from here on in. The Casa part is a nod to my Hispanic heritage, which is quite faux in many regards, but exists nonetheless. You see, I say that my father was Venezuelan, which, technically, he was before he emigrated to the United States and took on American citizenship as my mother’s husband. Indeed, my parents met in Venezuela in the late 1940’s and lived there until the late 1950’s. So, it is not entirely incorrect to say that I have a Hispanic heritage, but then again, my father was only Venezuelan for a dozen years, where he had been a native-born and bred Italian before that. Italian is not really Hispanic though I suspect most people would hav a hard time discerning the accent difference when he spoke in his deep gravelly voice.
Casa Moonstruck is now a theme for us. My Tesla is called Moonshadow, again, less about the celestial body and more about conforming it to the house name and as an added recognition that Cat Stevens (a.k.a. Yusuf) had such soulful songs from the 1970’s that still haunt my memories of peaceful times gone by. I have also painted a much-too-yellow moon high up on a boulder on the southwestern part of our property, below the Cecil Garden and to the side of our guest wing. I started by painting a big Raphine agave plant in shades of green, and then noticed a high stacked rounded boulder above it that looked like a perfect place to paint a moon. It was in honor of our Casa Moonstruck theme and it took the rental of a big ladder and the risk to life and limb of a big guy on an aluminum ladder to execute, but I got it done. I tried so hard to copy the shape and look of the moon’s cratered surface, and while I think I got the shape and markings more or less right, the spray can color came out far too yellow to be realistic. I am not happy with it, but I am less happy about going back up on a ladder to try to modify it. I am counting on nature to fade it and make it feel more moonlike.
I have also called our games area, which I built two summers ago for our granddaughters (who may finally see and use it this Spring), Moonstruck Madness. I have a red sign on the fence heading into the games area and a stenciled red name on the smallish Bocci Ball court. That is particularly relevant to the Moonstruck name as you may recall that the grandfather in Moonstruck goes to the Brooklyn Heights Bocci Ball court with his dogs and tells his old Italian friends how his son doesn’t do the right thing by his children because Vincent Gardenia refuses to pay for Cher’s wedding. So, it was only natural that when Kim told me that I needed to find a name for my new Hobbit House project, my sister Kathy went out on a limb and gave me for my birthday a handmade wooden sign with the passage “Welcome to Moonstruck Shire”. That is now the name of the Hobbit House, Moonstruck Shire, in honor of Bilbo Baggins and all his Hobbit brethren.
The sign is carved in the wooden plaque with whimsical, Elfin script. With the characteristic three dots in the middle of all the o’s and above the e’s. Needless to say, this is just a mystical affectation intended to mimic the fertile mind of J.R.R. Tolkien as he made up his Middle Earth fantasies and added a touch of detail less in the language in the printed version of the language. That is a proper reflection of the whole Moonstruck theme I have developed. It doesn’t really mean anything, but it does impart a touch of whimsy and hopefully involves at least an inner smile as we all want to think that our homes are special and as homey as home can be. What is homier than Middle Earth and The Shire. It is the Ithaca of Ulysses as Homer thought it. Wait a minute, Homer, Home, Ithaca….damn, all these years and I never made the Home/Homer connection. It must be almost a full moon for me to have such revelations. Indeed, I am clearly suffering from Moonrise Madness this morning (I do write these over time) even though I had an uninterrupted 7 hours and 39 minutes of sleep last night…thank you, God.