The Moon's Proud Parens

Languishing in primary school as a lad, I was furnished with easily digestible morsels of fact and fiction, blended and homogenized to prevent the doubt, scrutiny, investigation and subsequent mutiny for which public-school classrooms have always been famous. One particularly memorable example had to do with the origin of the very moon you and I enjoy today—or perhaps tomorrow, if it's cloudy where you live—and I'm not talking about green cheese, or any of those silly pseudoscientific analyses you might have read about on the Web. I'm referring to the idea that, millions of years before the first automobile, Earth's moon was torn from the left side of Earth herself, then spun into position by nearby gravitational forces while simultaneously shedding the excess lumpiness that had previously belonged to his mother.

Here, I hasten to clarify my use of directional cues—such as left—in connection with the spatial ambiguity of space. At that time our sun had not yet burst into flame, so the ferrous metals used in its construction hadn't yet melted. Thus, compass needles always pointed toward the sun—marked with an S on most compasses of the day—instead of toward the E, which didn't come into widespread use until the latter part of the seventh century.

Continuing on, the mystery of our moon's ancestry became far less murky during my high-school years, when a substitute teacher used her brief tenure as a soapbox from which to preach the gospel of astronomical enlightenment, at least insofar as moons are concerned. Mrs. Cüi was a Lunatic, and so was able to further illuminate the minds of the hippie-come-lately generation that infested the classrooms of the day. The metronomic cadence of her words hypnotized, and when I came to, it was as if I had always known of the lunar parentheticals, but had simply been too shy to say so.

Today, I know there's little to be gained from books generally, and I especially avoid those that claim special insight in matters of the moon. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look up and recognize familial similarities. His parens must be mighty proud.