=Moon in the Man=

On the good nights, dad kicked the footrest up on his ratty old easy chair and lay back in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, a gin glass in his hairy paw. He told us about what it was like to be an astronaut. He told us about life in the lunar module, the weightlessness, the naughty jokes astronauts told each other, the spite, the jealousy, the petty bickering of men living in such unnaturally cramped quarters. Feet up, drifting in memory, he looked like he might still have been strapped inside a space capsule orbiting 200,000 miles above the earth. He told us about walking on the moon. "This was after the Armstrong and Aldrin days," he'd remark, a trace of bitterness in his tone, the ice clinking in his glass, "when the romance and glamour were over. These were the moonwalks no one talked about. When the real work was done." 

He was making it all up, of course. Like when he told us he once played a few games for the Boston Celtics before he injured his knee or the time he served as an Army Ranger in Laos. Maybe because he began telling us these stories when we were so young, they've somehow become so inextricably woven into the texture of our lives that they don't seem like outright lies even now, but more like declensions of the truth, whatever that might mean. In truth, he worked in a factory that made something they put in televisions when they still had factories in America. He fell in love with one of his co-workers when I was nine, shortly before the factory closed. He and my mother divorced soon after and we moved to another state and I didn't see much of him anymore. 

"It was the only place I ever felt truly free," he'd say wistfully, speaking of the moon, his glass empty, even the ice gone, crunched resentfully between his molars. 

I can still see him taking the dog out for the last piss of the night, standing there at the back of the yard, smoking a cigarette, the moon shining off a bald spot floating over the hunched, resentful shadow of a man who never looked up.