Moon Men and Earth Mothers: a Tale of Endless Love…and Hate…and Love…

“And, love,
I’ll be that fool for you,
I’m sure.
You know I don’t mind.
Oh, you know I don’t mind.
And, yes, you’ll be the only one,
‘cause no one can deny
this love I have inside.
And I’ll give it all to you,
my love, my love, my love,
my endless love.”

--Lionel Richie and Diana Ross



I’m standing in the self-checkout lane at Cub. Because this is the Cub on University Avenue in St. Paul, two of the registers are covered with quickly written magic marker signs that read “Out of Order.” This leaves two open registers. At one, of course, a man is having trouble entering the weight of the produce he’s buying. At the other, a woman is fidgeting with a large stack of coupons. Clearly, it would have been much faster for these people to just go through the express lane and let the professionals handle the registers.

But there’s something appealing to a certain group of people, of whom I am one, about the self-check-out lane at Cub. Here you can buy whatever you want without all the hassle of human interaction. In some small way, you are making a statement about your fierce independence. So self-reliant are you that you’ve taken on the responsibilities usually reserved for someone with a nametag and extensive knowledge of the price per pound of produce. “See?” you tell yourself once you’ve quieted the electronic voice telling you to remove that “unexpected item” from the bagging area. “I can do this myself. I don’t need anyone else.”

But even as I stood waiting for my turn to prove my independence, Lionel Richie and Diana Ross crooned over the store’s loudspeaker, professing their eternal devotion, their deep and abiding need for one another, their endless love. And all at once, the epic story of man and woman—of humankind—crushed in on me. It had been screaming at me since I left the house, but until now, I hadn’t really heard.

I had decided to bring my roommate’s dog with me for a late-night run the store. Before getting in the car, I walked her down to the end of the block. As we approached the corner, a car parked on St. Clair pulled a U-ey in what I would call a pretty urgent manner. There were no other cars on the street, so I wasn’t sure what the woman driver’s hurry was until a man’s voice shouted from a window in one of the upper stories of the apartment building across the street, “Fuck you, bitch!”

His voice was so angry, so loud; it absolutely shattered the calm night air. As a pickup truck loaded with what was probably the woman’s share of the household furniture followed after her speeding car, I scanned the lighted windows of the apartment building for the heartbroken man’s silhouette. Also, I scanned for the silhouette of the heartbroken man’s gun. Finding neither, I quickly moved from my hiding place behind an annoyingly small tree and double-timed it to my car down the block.

The man’s wrathful cry was still ringing in my ears as I waited for oncoming traffic to slow so I could turn left onto University Avenue. The light changed, and a white pickup truck that now had the green light moved impatiently into the intersection and made as if to hit my car. For the second time in five minutes, a man’s voice rang angrily through the night, but this time, the intended targets were my own delicate female ears. “Asshole!” he yelled.

I don’t know if I was more surprised to be thus treated or to have the wrongly gendered “asshole” applied to me. I wanted to set the record straight, to let him hear my woman’s voice and alert him of his faux pas. To my frustration, all that came to me was, “Shut up!” Too late, I thought to add a more gender-appropriate curse than his and shouted, “Bastard!” but he was gone, already speeding off in the opposite direction.

“What is wrong with the men in this city tonight?” I wondered aloud to the dog in the backseat. She looked back at me blankly, perplexed and utterly without an answer.

I had an odd list of things to pick up at Cub: cookie dough, a barrette for my increasingly unruly hair, and bread. I made for the health-and-beauty section of the store and found it nearly deserted. There was only one other person within a five-aisle radius, and it was a man. At first, I’d been surprised to see a guy in this section, but any uneasiness I might have felt at entering this secluded corner of the store at night was quelled when I saw that he was examining the nail-care products. “Phew,” I said to myself. “It’s just a harmless metrosexual.”

I found the aisle with hair accessories and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the man was walking slowly towards me. I got in my defensive stance and prepared to scurry around the end cap if he got any closer. I was especially concerned to realize that he seemed to be whispering to himself. I grabbed my barrettes and glanced up to plan my escape route. It was then I noticed a cord trailing from his ear to his pocket. He was not talking to himself about the various brands of lady shavers but to someone on the other end of the phone. His voice was soft and appeasing: “They’ve got a three-pack on sale, baby.” The marionette string that was his phone cord twitched, and his arms moved for nail polish remover, for conditioner and razors not of is own volition but in direct response to the whispered commands of a woman he loved.

My heart was softened a bit by the scene of a man running unmanly errands for his special lady. I had nearly forgotten all the shouting and swearing I’d heard tonight as I picked up the cookie dough and made for the bread aisle. I snagged a loaf of the cheapest wheat and noticed a small piece of cardboard on the nearly empty shelf. On one side was an ink drawing depicting the familiar pattern of a skull and crossbones, but where the skull should have been, the artist had drawn a heart with eyes that were crying. A similar figure appeared on the back of the cardboard, perhaps an earlier draft of the emblem, along with a crude drawing of a cloud and several lightning bolts.

“Hmm,” I thought as I headed toward the self-checkout lanes.

Several minutes later, still waiting for the man with his produce and the woman with her coupons to figure out the machines, I took a deep breath to avoid strangling them. In my newly calm state, I became aware of the music playing over the store’s sound system.

Lionel Richie sings, “My love, there’s only you in my life, the only thing that’s bright,” and I think of the moon. Tonight it’s low and waning. As I was parking my car in the grocery store’s lot, I’d noticed its pale form hanging dejectedly over Herberger’s. It’s two nights since the moon was full, and now it looks like someone took a lady shaver to its right side. The Man in the Moon will lose more and more of his light to the black of the night sky, and he seems to know it.

Diana Ross’ voice seems placating to me now, offering assurances of her love in irresistibly sweet tones, singing over Lionel’s lines with a soft urgency. Diana, goddess of the hunt and of the moon, reassures her man: “You’re every breath that I take. You’re every step I make.”

I thought of the woman speeding away from the apartment building on my street, the end of romance breaking the night with a disembodied curse from above. Was it the waning moon shouting after her from its low perch in the sky? “Go on, leave! And take that sliver of light off my right side with you! Fuck you, bitch!”

The squeal of tires, and my mind morphs her dark hatchback into a white pickup speeding off into the night. Had the man heard me shout my lame “Shut up…bastard”? Did he feel bad about calling me an asshole? Probably not. Had he wished he called me a bitch? Maybe.

And I wonder to myself if the man in the health-and-beauty section has moved on to the feminine hygiene products yet. Is there a pillow-soft voice whispering directly into his ear about a preferred brand of tampons?

Love is a treacherous thing, it seems to me. The mystery bread-aisle artist had captured the sentiment so simply, so eloquently in the skull-and-crying-heart drawing.

“And your eyes, your eyes, your eyes, tell me how much you care.” Lionel and Diana are working their way to the song’s climactic declaration of endless love, and all the events of the night press upon me in a fleeting glimpse and only marginal understanding of the epic struggle, the eternally rocky relationship between men and women. And suddenly I think of the lightning in the heart-and-crossbones drawing, the violence with which the sky seeks electrical balance with the earth.

There is something in the air tonight between the men and women of St. Paul, all toiling under the waning moon. I know I must do something on behalf of my sex, a small gesture at reconciliation. Some human interaction might be required. For this moment in time, I will have to abandon my independence and the self-checkout lane. I see that there are two express lanes open, one with a female cashier, one with a male. I make for the lane with the man at the register.

He rings up my three items, and I slide my credit card through the machine. A sign above the man reads that credit card transactions for purchases below $25 don’t require a signature. But this might be my only chance to communicate the apologies of my sex for our role in the lunacy of the evening, to reassure this man that, like Diana, we all “can’t resist your charms.” So I pick up the fake pen attached to the credit card machine and pretend to get ready to sign.

“Oh, you don’t have to sign,” the cashier says as if he’s doing me a huge favor. I look him straight in the eye and channel Diana Ross for my one word reply that contains the whole of human interaction: “Awesome.”