Andy Mooney

I don’t get the moon, even though lots of people seem to like it. Children are supposed to have “phases,” not celestial bodies deserving our admiration. I guess the moon is full of it. I’m old enough to remember when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I met Armstrong and his partner Buzz Aldrin once at a stuffy soirée in midtown Manhattan. Buzz is a funny name for an astronaut. He probably would have made a fine clown, too. I told him as much. Everyone at the party was enamored with the two moonwalkers. I don't want to go to the moon. I'd rather go to Alaska.

I have all these items from the first moon landing in '69. Coffee mugs, t-shirts, buttons, bobble-head dolls, stamps, hats, and a plastic kazoo I haven’t blown in decades. I have all this stuff to commemorate someone talking a walk. Strange, isn't it?

I take walks all the time, too. Around my block in my slippers, my bare feet or these rubber boots that haven’t seen action since the Second World War. I walk around my neighborhood with my dog Walter or my wife. Her name isn’t Walter, but I do cherish her privacy. Sometimes, when it’s nice out the ice cream man rings his bell and I buy a cone or two. He sells something called mooncakes, though I never buy them. 

I don't understand why we went to the moon at all. It seemed crazy at the time, especially during the middle of the Vietnam War. Then we kept going back. I guess now we know why, with Watergate and all. I suppose the people at NASA are worthy our respect, but I still don’t see the appeal. The moon is so far away. I don’t like trips where I can’t roll the windows down so I wouldn’t have made a good astronaut.

Mooning is something we used to do as kids on trips to Coney Island. This was during the roaring 20s and it was okay to be a little inappropriate at the beach. I’m not going to admit anything on national television, but there are more than a few people in Washington who could use a good mooning. That’s certainly something I can get behind. 

Our moon isn’t unique either. It’s just the one in our neck of the woods. Jupiter has 79 moons. Saturn has 82. That’s a lot of moons. You don’t see any t-shirts or bumper stickers about that, do you? When I was in the service, no one much cared about the moon. It was just another dot in the sky. We were much more concerned with the dots that fell out the sky. Mortar shells and other heavy artillery. 

There used to be a word for people who loved the moon: Lunatics.