the silver jag
by celia miles

Sometimes I see it still–that orange globe, that golden glow atop the dark mountain, that moon that became metaphor. I was barely twenty, remarkably innocent, romantic to the core. And in love. We were driving home from college—my “older man” boyfriend and I. He had arrived in his silver Jaguar at the Kentucky campus to pick me up. I’d shown him off to a couple of most-close friends and kept him away from the inspection of dorm mother Mrs. Borland. She’d never have let me start out with a man only a year or so younger than my dad, start on a seven-hour unchaperoned journey with a clearly sophisticated engineer in a white shirt and tie. Even if my parents had written a note, which, of course, they hadn’t, thinking I was with hometown Ricky Briggs.

I was in heaven–the leather seats, the masculine smell of cigarettes and cologne, the radio tuned to soft romantic sounds. We swung through the mountains of east Tennessee and were, I think, ascending Cumberland Mountain. I had abandoned my glasses, needed, I assured myself, only for reading, not for swooning beside MY man. I begged and received permission to drive on the empty highway and the sense of gliding smoothness on the road was one never communicated in our old black Ford. The darkness enveloped us and so the silence. I glanced up and sighed a long sigh. “Look at that beautiful moon,” I said in my newly acquired husky-with-love voice.

Jim looked up and then looked over at me. “Pull this car over to the side of the road,” he said. “That’s not the moon. It’s a God damn Gulf station sign.”

That moment was a defining one for me, revealing the chasm between magic and reality, between what I was sure I saw and what was, in fact, there, between the glow of youthful naïveté and the armor of adult awareness. Love wasn’t lost that night and I drove the silver Jag a few more times, but the moon has never been quite the same for me.