Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The night before I leave New York,  the moon will be 0.82% full and waning. I looked it up on a phases of the moon calendar.  

The night I arrive in Ecuador there will be a new moon. What are the chances?

Last Friday, when I arrived in Philly for my final family weekend before I move to a different continent for two years, there was an actual blue moon, which, I learned, has nothing to do with the color, but is when there are two full moons that fall within the same month.  

The next night, as we were camping on the Chesapeake Bay after a day of sailing and cracking crabs, the moon was missing just a sliver, but still plenty bright to illuminate the neighboring cornfield and make the water sparkle as we swam in the middle of the night.

And last night, as Alan and I rode a night bus back to New York, that same moon was looming large and orange over the skyline, rusty and round and just a tiny bit slimmer than it had been the night before. It is waning. So is my time left in New York, my home. The moon, it seems, has become my countdown calendar, a lunar version of an old-fashioned hourglass. When this moon dwindles away and the new moon appears, I will start my new life in Ecuador.

Bus rides are good for contemplating things like that. 

I’ve also been contemplating the nature of good-byes.  

I’ve become a fan of the short good-bye.  As I left my family at the barbecue, it was likely the last time I’ll see my mom and dad and sisters for a while - maybe 4 months, maybe 10. But we had a bus to catch, which wouldn’t wait for sentimental notions, so there were quick hugs and kisses and well-wishes, a bottle of wine tucked into my bag (a symbolic gift from my dad because of the mountains on the label), then into the car and off to the station.

I like short good-byes because they are forward-looking. They recognize the unknowability of the future and embrace it. They help you charge ahead.

I have some very dear friends who tend to embrace long, if not lugubrious, good-byes (you know who you are!), with lots of hugging and exclaiming and thanking and planning when to meet again and promising to write or call or text. And I totally get that, too - it’s a way of showing gratitude, of letting people you care about know that you have valued the time you spent together, of showing appreciation for what they bring to your life, vocalizing the tenderness we feel when letting go, even temporarily, of people that we love. 

But there’s something appealing about a short good-bye. A short good-bye is about looking ahead, not backwards. It’s about getting on with it! It’s knowing that you’ll meet again if and when the universe decrees it. The short good-bye works best when you’re secure in knowing that the people you are leaving know how much they are loved, and that you’ll always be in touch in whatever ways you can be, and that you will continue loving them just as fiercely from afar. It’s a ripping-off-the-band-aid scenario…onward, towards the new adventure! Let’s see what life has to offer! What lies around the bend!? Every beginning is an end, and every end a beginning…

So with that in mind…

Bye!