Over the Moon

I just spent an hour and a half catching up with three weeks' worth of the New York Times (it's work-related). What a great, great newspaper. What better proof that it's a great paper than the fact that I'm repeatedly reminded anew of what a great paper it is? It's hard to take the Times for granted.

Amid all the interesting and well-made articles, reviews, opinion pieces, and photographs was this gorgeous little keeper of a personal reflection on the editorial page by Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Watching the Full Moon Rise Over the Northeast Corridor." I love riding Amtrak, in all its tedium and its rhythmic beauty, and he captures the experience exactly, though the article is mostly about observing the moon from his seat.

I adore these sentences:

"The full moon was rising on the ride home. At first there was just the suggestion of a disk low on the horizon. It might have been a moon painted on old red brick, faded and soot-stained over the eons, the remnant of an ad for some forgotten nocturnal medicine. I'd been watching the way Baltimore backs blindly onto the tracks -- the toothless old houses, boarded up, beyond despair, here and there a wall gone entirely so that the houses seem to be leaking their privacy into the night."