The Moon: beautiful, mysterious, remote. Fishy-colored. Pretty nearly round.

For centuries... and even longer chunks of time... men have looked up at her (down, if suspended by their heels), and wept tears of unrequited longing.

Or were they? Recent findings (Discover magazine, found recently amid subsofa debris while groping for the misplaced unused portion of a personal pizza) indicate that Mother Moon, while distant (1/4 million miles they say, but really, how could they know?), may have been, after all, not entirely incommunicado these past few eons. A number of intriguing finds by scientists worldwide have given rise to speculation that Lady Luna may have all along been making periodic overtures to Earth throughout the course of human history.

In AD 345, for example, a Hun chieftain, Vince the Vociferous, is on record as having unearthed, while digging in during an especially vexatious Roman cavalry assault, a peculiar lumpy cobble displaying on its surface the apparent inscription, "If found, please return to moon." No further record is extant of this early, and somewhat coy, lunar hanky drop, though field anthro-astro-geophysicists continue in their quest for sequels to "The Vince Directive".

Later (earlier if you are living backward), during the Roman abandonment of Britain, when, due to a shortage of the materials requisite to the manufacture of a truly durable tea bag, peeved armies of Druidic-Hoshanna revellers , their togas indelibly stained, raised their bloodcurdling battle cry ("There's Nothing For It!") in Threadneedle Street, startling and accidentally defenestrating the Viceroy's pet pomeranian, rendering Britain unliveable, one Hork Tunbod, a barrelstopper by trade, stung by recent debarment from the Containerers' Guild, sighted in the rioting crowd a detractor whom he felt to be responsible for his present reverses and made ready to let fly from the stable loft that had become his home a cobble-sized gob of Berkshire pig dung. He glanced up, according to his later testimony, to see emblazoned across the face of the full moon the words "Turn again turn again Hork Tunbod thrice Corkwhacker General" in Bodoni semibold, accompanied by a small beermug motif. Following his restoration to full bungsetter's status, he applied for and was granted a personal trade mark incorporating the mug-and-moon theme.

Pig dung, interestingly, figures again in another report, this one traceable to the Paris of early June, 1302, and specifically to the rooms of a financially strapped university instructor in Canon Law. Pieter Friesbumm, an exchange fellow living in well-deserved poverty in the basement of a notorious Left Bank stew, The Wench and Weasel, having surrendered his last three sous in the settlement of a gambling debt, retired to his flat to hang himself from a stout floor joist which he had been eyeing for some time with this in mind. As he stepped down into his meager digs, his attention was immediately caught by a single brilliant beam of moonlight threading a rathole in the base of the outer wall and striking the floor beside his bed. In the stretched-out oval of light lay a man's pigskin wallet, empty except for a laundry ticket. Beside it lay its owner, dead but nicely dressed. After removing such items of clothing as bore substantial residual value, Pieter removed the man himself to an alley nearby. The next day he sold the proceeds of his find, ate well, gambled a little and bought his sometime girlfriend, known in the district as La Lunette, a pinky ring of braided pewter. That night he ran across her in the Keg and Dimple, presented her with the ring and retired with her to his cellar digs. A few hours later, he awoke to find his home revisited by the same shaft of moonlight, slanting down from the wall above and falling, this time, squarely, or rather roundly, on the broadly curving backside of La Lunette, which shone in its spotlight like a splendid giant peach. To his surprise, a small tattoo, new to him, appeared there. Folding himself forward, taking care not to awaken her, he leaned in closely to inspect it. Depicted in three colors, mid-cheek on her right side, hung a crescent moon, winking, encircled in the teal-green motto, "You Are A Stranger Here But Once". It was in French, of course, which requires fewer, and lovelier, words.

Where, you may be asking now, does the notion of pig dung appear in this sweet sad fragment of a no doubt tragic longer tale, and to what extent may we reasonably credit the agency of the moon in the presentation of what is, in any case, a message of clouded significance? Dear reader, these are questions for which, though I have wracked my brain for many minutes, I have no answers.

So, in sum, what have we learned? A soldier finds a rock and hallucinates; a drunken tradesman, unable to find a rock, "pitches pig", in the phrase of the time, and hallucinates; a dissolute medieval cleric named after a rock, finds momentary perfection and hallucinates. Or not. Who knows? Certainly no one with a listed phone number. But you and I, and that fellow over there beating his fists against the vending machine, are free to speculate that these few small shards of folk history are evidence, however thin, of an ethereal interplanetary conversation binding men, and, when time permits, women, in a special relationship to Earth's shining sibling planetoid, our Moon.