To the Moon

Sitting in the outdoor tub the other night, gazing at the first-quarter Moon: It was so beautiful that I spontaneously saluted it, as if making a toast, and said out loud, “To the Moon!” That tributary phrase hung in the air for a few moments, as I savored the view. Then the same expression got dredged up from my deep memory banks, when I heard it repeatedly used half a century ago by Jackie Gleason, in his show “The Honeymooners.” Playing Ralph Kramden, he would get a threatening look in his eye, as he warned his TV wife (played by Audrey Meadows), “To the Moon, Alice.” The warning was similar to Archie Bunker’s demand that his wife Edith “Stifle it!” (Ah, the good old days, when husbands’ threats were condoned.)

I continued to sit there and let the expression linger in the air awhile longer, wondering what other examples might come to mind. That phrase “To the Moon” has been used in so many ways—other than in homage or admonition.

Jack Kennedy used it when he launched the US on the Apollo Mission: “We choose to go to the Moon…” And we did. We went and then we abruptly stopped, nearly 40 years ago. Today many countries are showing a renewed interest in lunar exploration. People are again going “to the Moon.”

As I sat and continued to soak, I conjured up other unrelated ways in which this catchphrase has found use. Of course, there are countless poems, songs, and books that have employed it. The pop tune “Fly Me to the Moon.” Jules Verne’s 1873 classic book, From Earth “to the Moon”. A British spinoff: The Hitchhiker’s “Guide to the Moon.”

It’s been used more than a few times in high-school science classes. A quiz question asks, “What’s the distance to the Moon?” Or the teacher might describe a lunar eclipse as happening when the sun sends the Earth’s shadow “to the Moon.”

In the days of yore, when people believed in an Earth-centered universe, one might make a list (in order of distance from Earth) of what were then considered to be the seven planets rotating around us: 1. the Sun, “2. the Moon”, …

Enough!