I love to look at the Moon with Ava.<\/p>\n
Some months ago, when the weather was warm and the light stayed in the evening sky past bed time, I was out in the front yard with Ava, she in my arms, looking at the full Moon as it crawled up over the treetops. I told her it was important to stop and look at a full Moon whenever she saw one, because they don’t come along every day. She said it was beautiful (because she’d heard me call it beautiful), and I looked over at her face, which was bathed in that gentle white light that only comes from the Moon. She was beautiful. Ava didn’t look at me, she only kept gazing up into the sky.<\/p>\n
I read an op\/ed piece in the Wall Street Journal today extolling NASA’s plan to build a working colony on the Moon by 2024. Ava will be 20. I’ll be 54. If all goes according to plan (and how could it not?), Ava will be off at school somewhere by then. She’ll be too big to hold on my hip anyway. She won’t remember standing in the yard with me that night, and of course she’ll never know what it was like for me to see the Moon for the first time through her eyes. She won’t remember me saying, “I love you,” and maybe by 2024 that particular I Love You will have faded from my mind, too.<\/p>\n
Ava’s only a little girl, and I probably spend way too much time pondering her future. Everything about her future. Mostly, I think about what we’ll mean to each other when she becomes a woman and I’m an old man. Still her old man. The Moon will wax and wane hundreds of times in the interim. It’ll look exactly the same from down here as it always has, except — if you look really, really closely — you might be able to see a tiny structure up there. Ava and I will look different.<\/p>\n
Still, I can imagine standing next to her in the cool night grass, the moonlight setting her face aglow just like it did when she was two. I say, “I love you,” and she smiles, but she keeps looking into the sky. The Moon is reflected perfectly in her wide, brown eyes, only a tiny pale spot, and I feel like I’m seeing it for the first time.<\/p>\n
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