Full moon over Arkville

Mostly there is little conversation, a comfortable silence in an overly heated minivan, punctuated with my daughter’s mostly acceptable playlist, as she scrolls through her social media feeds on her phone while munching on clementines. We are in the van, heading home from swim practice on a Tuesday night in the dead of winter. She notices, a few seconds before I do. “Is that the moonlight? Look how bright it is up ahead, on the road!” Yes. A big, bright full moon on a clear winter’s night in the Catskills. We are chugging along uphill, heading east on an empty Route 28, leaving the tiny Catskills hamlet of Arkville – you could call it a “suburb of Margaretville,” if Margaretville were indeed worthy enough of having “suburbs” -- and heading back to civilization. So much about this night constitutes “normal,” and the piercing moonlight punctuates that.

A swim practice for very fit and very motivated young women and men. Warm pool on a cold night. A smattering of bored parents in the parking lot; I’m part of that cohort, but “bored” never enters my mind. I’m warm, I’m listening to a great podcast, I’ve got a new book out of the library, I’m answering an occasional text, maybe I drift off for a power nap. I’ve been here, in this scenario, dozens of times. Only the “here” was never Arkville, a journey into Delaware County through remote sections of Ulster County and through the heart of the Catskills, a drive that typically takes longer than bringing my daughter back to college. Which will be at the end of February. Also, not normal. Ah. But, for once, let’s embrace the normalcy. Swim practice. Whittling away the time on a cold, dark night in an icy parking lot. A full moon on a clear winter’s night. As we end 2020 with a goal of embracing gratitude, here’s one small thing to note on the stack of index cards in my office: For a few minutes, out there on the usually darkened Route 28, I didn’t have to flip on my high-beam lights. The regular headlights, abetted by the full moon, did the trick. The fact that we had to travel all the way to this remote outpost for precious pool time? Vintage 2020! Everything else about this random Tuesday night? The glass-half-full view is to smile and say, “hey, that was pretty normal.” Remember back to late March, April, May? “Pretty normal” would have been pretty damn good. Maybe there’s hope for more “pretty normal” in 2021. Maybe next time we notice that full moon illuminating the road, it will have been shining over a swim practice much closer to home, a more “normal” venue. The trick will be to appreciate it just as much as we did out there in the middle of nowhere, where the full moonlight pierced the darkness on a random Tuesday night, and maybe (symbolically, at least) expunged some of the darkness of an entire year.