Mid Autumn Moon in California

    A college student in HK just asked me, via email, How do you celebrate Mid Autumn Festival in America? Do you have moon cakes?

    We live only two miles from the Vietnamese shops and markets. They observe Chinese customs more than we, and moon cakes are plentiful. They love durian paste, but I don't know whether they make moon cakes with durian (lau leen fruit). It has a garlic-like pungent smell. Gloria cannot stand it.

    Last Saturday night we were at Goleta some 100 miles west of Los Angeles. A young adult brother invited three pretty ladies and us to go to Goleta Beach after a great dinner. Thanks to him and his marvelous camera, I now include a few of his photos here.

    Goleta beach is very clean, hardly visited by people, and had no hot dog stands etc. It stretches westward to UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara), where there are lagoons and wild geese and egrets. The beach is quiet and clean, 2 feet high surf was lapping on the sand. There is a pier, about 12 feet wide, stretching some 50 yards into the sea. No boats around within two miles. The ocean stretches out to the horizon where there are a few islands looking very much like the three islands 30 miles south of Hong Kong (Darm Gorn Shan, Ngun Chau, etc.), but that night we didn't see them.

    The night was unusually clear all the way to the horizon, with the bright moon about 20 degrees above leaving a silver gleam over the quiet sea. Quite a few people were at the pier, and the moonlight lit up every object with its silver sheen. It was high tide, and one felt like the whole sea was bulging up to quietly embrace us on the pier.

    Our brother brought a new digital camera costing him perhaps a thousand bucks, which could take pictures without any flash. I took two pictures of him and the girls, with the bright moon over them and the gleaming sea behind them. He displayed them on the back screen, and they were as beautiful as a magazine cover.
    Everything was so romantic and dreamy, that you cannot help but fall in love, not just with one person, but with everyone, everything.

    Back in his house, one of the ladies, Molly, was a concert pianist. I asked her to sit with me at the piano to do a duet. She said, "What duet? We have no music." I said, "No need for it. We just make things up. I play the bass, you play the treble."

    She said, "I cannot play without printed music." I said it is a new way of relaxing and creating music as one goes along. So we played a few hymns, 4 hands, including Since Jesus came into my heart, and It is well with my soul. We experimented with various styles and format, and I haven't had such good times on the piano for years.

See the shining airplane flying under the moon?

    Later on more young adults came, and we got them to sing Amazing Grace, all standing around the piano. I sang tenor, Molly sang alto, and we had a few beautiful soprano voices. We haven't had such fun with young people for years. It made us feel young again.

    Claude Debussy's Moonlight song, called Clair de Lune, aptly portrays the atmosphere this night. He locked the music in a safe until he died, forbidding others to touch it. So I was told.

    Why did God create beauty and romantic atmospheres? So that we can enjoy its beauty, and think why it is there. He made the sun to shine equally on the good and the bad, Chinese, Americans, Moslems, even the Talibans. He loves them all.

    Let us love then, for He is love.