The City of Pittsburgh and the Perigee Moon

On Friday I learned that on Saturday night we would be able to see the Perigee moon, or "super moon" in Pittsburgh. This one night---and not again for 18 years---the moon would be closer to the earth, and would thus appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter. I also read that the sunset would be at 7:31 PM and the moon would rise at 7:52 PM, in the Eastern sky. I pictured driving up to a nearby lookout spot, called Schenley Oval, where we could see a wide view of the city, but then I realized that Schenley park faces due West, and that the moon would rise in the East. I remembered that we might have a great view of the moon from Mount Washington, and so I planned for us to drive up there as a family to see the moon.

We got the kids dressed in their jammies and threw some shoes and their coats in the car. We drove up to Mount Washington in record time. We saw clusters of couples holding hands, and about a half-dozen professional photographers with cameras as big as telescopes pointed towards the Eastern horizon. At 7:52 we started looking for the moon, even a bit frantically. No moon. I took about 12 shots of the horizon, because Pittsburgh was laid out below us in a blue-black shimmery wonder, tinged with pink-orange-lavender in the West.

Jacob was not having a good time. "Mom, I'm cold. I wanna go home." He started fidgeting and squirming. I thought to myself, "great, this is probably just what I was like at his age." I remember complaining about being wet and cold the whole time we went into the snowy woods to cut our own Christmas tree, for example. But then I saw something that looked like a red-pink-orange hat on the edge of the horizon.

"Jacob, it's the moon!"

It really did look great. We ran down to a view finder at a lookout area but we realized we'd left our money in the car. By some great stroke of luck my English department business manager, Margaret, was there with her husband. They said it was their "date night." Margaret gave Jacob a quarter. Through the view finder the moon looked resplendent, like a giant peach with craters, lit as if from within.

I took a lot of pictures, but none of them came close to capturing the wonder of that moment. The moon really did look bigger, and it was such a glorious almost edible color, reflecting the pastel colored winter sunset. And Pittsburgh was so decidedly shimmery, with the sunset and the moon bouncing off the water and the bridges all below us.

When the moon had crept significantly up from the horizon we piled back in the car and headed home. I tried to take some more photos but I couldn't really get any good shots. We bundled the kids quickly into bed. Josh went to a birthday party for a friend of his and I watched the Pitt Panthers lose a heartbreaking NCAA tournament basketball game to the Butler Bulldogs. I fell asleep about 11:00 PM.

This morning when I was looking through the pictures I took last night I saw that I captured the moon rising over the horizon without realizing that the moon was in the picture (the first picture in the series, below). It made me realize that however prepared we are to see wonder, we can miss it even when it is right in front of our eyes! I hope some of you got to see the Perigee moon from your vantage point last night!

When Did You Forget?

We have an odd alarm system in our house left over from our previous owner. It's not connected to any central system that can notify the police, but every time any of the outer doors is breached a brief "beep beep beep" sounds, and a mechanical voice controlled by the alarm says which door has been opened.

I heard the front door alarm sound on Sunday morning and I went downstairs to investigate. Here is what happened next:

Me: Who went outside?

Jacob: Casey

Casey: I went very quietly, and then I heard someone say "Casey….Casey.”

Me: Who was it?

Casey: Maybe it was the birds who can talk?

Casey said it very matter-of-factly, and it was so lovely and trusting. It reminded me of the passage in Mary Poppins, which is written from the point of a starling who converses with all of the babies in the story:

Mrs. Banks had another child, Annabel Banks. She was a very cute baby who, like all other babies, could talk to birds and the sunlight. She told the Starling of her journey into the earth, but within a week, had forgotten all about it. That made the Starling upset, because he loved to talk to babies and they always forgot how to so soon.

For some reason this passage has always stuck with me, long into adulthood, and I thought about it a lot when Jacob and Casey were babies. It always struck me as probably quite true. Perhaps Casey can still hear them!

Definitely a Contender

If there's a contest, Jacob wants to win it. Whether it's barging ahead of his sister on the way down the stairs, or being the first one to spot a live animal on an Arizona mountain trail for the privilege of getting the first bite of dessert (thanks, Nana), Jacob will do his darndest to win.

Perhaps the school officials at Linden Elementary know this about Jacob, because this week kicked of the "read-a-thon" in which kids compete to see who can read the most minutes over a several week period. On Friday, when Jacob came home with all the information about the "read-a-thon" in his folder, Jacob insisted that he read to me. And read to me. And read to me.

He read to me on the couch, at the dining room table, and standing up in the kitchen while I made dinner. He read Oh the Places You'll Go (a really hard book, by the way), Go Dog Go, and 3 of the stories in Mercer Mayer's Little Critter Series. He wanted to put the number of minutes he read down on each individual slip of paper, but I suggested we keep a log of his minutes and turn in a slip of paper ever few days. Here you can see how many minutes he logged the first day.

My mom taught first grade for 16 years, and if I remember correctly one reason she liked to teach this age is that it was amazing to see kids learn to read. I've been thinking about this as I watch Jacob. Suddenly he sees words all around him, and he tries to read them, like the "latch" directions on Casey's car seat, and the PARKING sign we passed in the car the other day, and the PNC Bank sign, which he tried to read phonetically. It's more like alchemy than learning, and maybe that's what my mom loved about it all those years.

One last note about reading; watching Jacob learn to read I often joke that I am very glad I don't have to learn how to read as an adult, because the whole process looks really hard. I was reading in Parade magazine last week about journalist Bob Woodruff's war wound recovery process (in an article written by his wife), and how difficult, in fact, it was for him to learn to read as an adult recovering from serious brain trauma. I guess my joking isn't really all that funny. It turns out learning to read is exactly as hard as a looks.

Photogenic pair in Madera Canyon, Arizona

The blogger is on vacation in Arizona! Actually, I've made some pretty big changes this week. Josh and I are giving up cable, I've given up facebook, and Josh is giving up video football. We'll assess again in the fall when it's football season again. In the meantime we are visiting Nana and Papa in their new "snowbird" home in Green Valley, Arizona. They gave us tickets out here as our xmas present, and we were GLAD to get out of Pittsburgh's cold and snow for Spring Break. This picture was taken on a hike we took on Friday; My Aunt Susie and Cecil were there as well!

I'll post more pictures from Arizona, but for now these photogenic cuties will have to do!