I added the moon

to my sidebar.

Because Loopy did, and tonight it's a "waning gibbous" and "gibbous" is a word I just taste and savor and roll around on my tongue.

Sometime I'll tell you the story of walking to mass at Mother Teresa's place in Calcutta early in the morning, and looking up at the gibbous moon and why it seemed so perfectly gibbous...so almost-round and unnaturally luminous amid the thick smokiness of the third-world sky.

It's hard to describe that sky. Somewhere high up it was definitely a dusky darkish blue. But there's a heavy and oddly fragrant particulate haze—smoke from burning cow dung, garbage, and funeral pyres—that permeates the blue, and has its own color, a deep pink, so that the sky is blue and yet pink...and just beyond that, or so it seemed, quivered this moon, like a big fat glowing droplet of something sweet and syrupy... almost like you could touch it—not because it seemed close (it didn't), but because it seemed so touchable, in its fat pendulous not-quite-roundness.

It was just so... gibbous.

Oh. I just told you the story.

Well, anyway, that's why there's a moon in my sidebar. All seems strangely right with the world.