Decades ago, when my son Dave was only about five years old, he sat in the back seat of the car, staring at the full moon as I drove through the night. He was quiet, lost in thought.
“Dad,” he finally said, “why does the moon follow us?”
“Follow us?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Everywhere we go,” he said, “the moon has been following us. It doesn’t matter how fast we go, we can’t get ahead of it. It’s always there. But the other things don’t follow us.”
“What other things?”
“You know, trees and houses and stuff. When we drive past them, they fall behind. But the moon never falls behind. It follows us everywhere we go.”
I had to think about that a moment as I glanced out the window to confirm that he was right. There was a tree, dashing past, and behind it a big building, sliding past at a bit slower rate. But up in the sky was that big full moon, keeping perfect pace with us.
I considered cracking a joke about roots and foundations keeping trees and buildings from keeping up with us while the round moon rolled across the sky, but I decided that this might be one of those moments when truth might be more entertaining than a wisecrack.
But how do you explain something like that to a kid?
“It’s because the moon is so far away,” I tried.
“Why does that matter?” he asked.
“Well…” I said, unsure myself why it mattered, or how to explain it even if I knew. I wasn’t sure if I had ever thought of why the moon keeps pace with a speeding car, while trees and buildings dash past. “It’s a thing called perspective. That means that things look different to us far away than they look close up.”
He was silent, and I knew he had no idea what I was talking about. Which was apt, because neither did I.
I tried again. “It’s like… look up ahead at the cars in front of us. See how the car right in front of us looks big, but all those cars way up ahead seem to get smaller and smaller the farther away they are?” He nodded. “That’s perspective,” I said. “All those cars are really the same size, just as big as ours is, but they seem smaller when they’re far away.”
He nodded. “OK, but what does that have to do with the moon?”
Good question. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it seemed to me that there was some connection.
“Well,” I said, “you know that the moon is actually really, really big, right?” He nodded. “But it looks small because it’s so far away, like those cars way up in front of us.” He nodded again.
OK, so far so good. What next?
“And that tree we just passed looks way bigger than the moon,” I ventured, buying time while I sorted it out in my head. “But it’s actually way smaller than the moon is. It just looks bigger because it’s so much closer, because of perspective.” He nodded, probably wondering how and when I was going to get to the point.
I was, too.
“Well,” I said, finally starting to get it myself, “if distance can make things look bigger or smaller, it can also make things look like they’re moving faster or slower.”
He just stared, probably regretting asking the question in the first place. But I wasn’t about to give up now, because I was just getting it figured out myself.
“I mean, if you were on the moon looking at us in this car, it would look like we’re standing still. Even if we went a hundred miles an hour, it would look like we’re barely moving. That’s perspective — and it works both ways. To the moon, we’re standing still. Just like, to us, the moon stands still. It’s always in the same place in the sky. Closer things like trees look bigger, and they fall behind faster. Far away things like buildings look smaller, and they fall behind slower — or not at all if they’re really far away, like the moon.”
I stopped trying to explain it further because now Dave was quiet, pondering the miracle of perspective — or maybe thinking about baseball and knowing it was best not to ask me why a batter gets four balls but only three strikes.
I don’t know why I remembered that long-ago car ride conversation today, but it seems to me that a memory is like the moon, isn’t it? At the time, it may seem small and insignificant, but over the vast distance of a lifetime, you come to realize how large it really was all along.
And the more distant the memory, the more fixed it will be in your own personal universe, staying with you no matter how far or fast you travel — like that simple car – ride question from a kid who is now a dad answering simple car-ride questions from his own kids.
Ah, perspective!
Now, if it could only explain baseball.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
