Sometimes a date is a man telling a
woman that Louis Armstrong landed on the moon. You sit there and listen to this
garbage but your mind is already elsewhere, thinking of other mundane subjects
beyond the mundane subject of the conversation. But this isn’t a conversation.
He just talks at you. He pays no attention to your words and hopes, somehow,
that you will be impressed by him.
But then you think, as his voice
drones on, that seeing Louis Armstrong on the moon would be brilliant and this
person has actually, inadvertently, conjured up an event that you could only
hope to experience. A Jazz band could shuffle into place on the dull ash-like dirt of
the moon and on a podium could stand Louis Armstrong smiling like he does, famously,
with those eyes and mouth. Planet Earth would hang in the dark space behind him,
just over his right shoulder, like a distant forgotten bauble. As the tiny white holes in the black twinkle, a shooting star traces over the lunar horizon and the band begins with the sound of a familiar trombone. What a Wonderful World is sung, and love emanates
from a dead, gray rock, with a jazz band, towards the only nearby place with
life.
And then you are back on Planet
Earth. Your gin and tonic looks flat and the man in front of you is telling you that Stanley Kubrick directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And you think to yourself, what a wonderful world.
