Blue Moon Moments

Yesterday I visited a palm reader. She examined my right hand, and chuckled. “You’ve gotten smarter since last time.” I conceded that I had. Many long nights at the law school library had given me a newfound sense of intellect and insight. Law school had also given me a new political outlook into which my right wing conservative parents couldn’t see.

“Something else is new,” she said. “See this line? This is your heart line. The end of it—the part going up toward your fingers—indicates love. But this—this is different.” She traced my heart line half-way across my hand. “The heart line splits,” she said. She paused, and looked up at me with a furrowed brow. “Most people have one line that goes straight across their palm. Yours splits…” Her sentence
trailed off, and she thought for a moment. “There will be two things in your life that you love with equal, constant, unconditional love. ” She said it as though she had just diagnosed me with cancer.

Although the palm reader seemed surprised at this split in lines, the concept of divided love was not new to me. I had known for years that there were two great loves in my life. And I knew I could love these two simultaneously, whole-heartedly, unfalteringly. I smiled at her, wondering whether I would be charged for this preconceived serendipity.

Every once in a blue moon, a moment occurs in which the world stops turning, every one else ceases to exist, the troubles of the day disappear, and love, friendship, and music transcend reality. It is a cosmic rarity. The stars must align perfectly, it seems. And yet, this is the blue moon moment I share with my six best friends every time a band plays Brown Eyed Girl. The sky opens up and God’s moon spotlights an extravaganza of the best “singing-with-your-eyes-closed-dancing-moves-you-didn’t-even-know-you-had” four minutes of your life. It all happens in slow motion. Just like a Kodak commercial of yesteryear.

It is an occasion that should not be missed. I’ve heard it compared to the Aurora lights. Except we aren’t in Alaska. We’re deep in the heart of Louisiana. And the spectacle is not in the sky. It is right here on Earth, on the back porch of an old plantation home. The only lights in the sky are the stars—and the occasional blue moon—under which 7 best friends dance in the presence of a great brass band, a few bottles of wine, and a crowd of people wishing they’d made friends like these in high school.

These six girls are my other love. The ones with whom Bruce will always share my heart. I suppose I could have told the palm reader that the divided line represented the 6-pak, but it was too much fun to let her think I was a mysterious woman. Besides, you can’t tell those readers too much…they’ll start making educated guesses.