Saturday night was the full moon, a big one.  The sky was clear at sunset and as I drove to the grocery store I saw it coming up over Towhead peak.  It startled me when I realized what it was.  I thought it was a street light or a car sitting in the trees with its headlights pointing at me or a jetliner coming in for a landing on Main Street only it was bigger and brighter than any of those.  The ski club’s moonlight party was scheduled for 10 pm but I doubted more than a couple of people would show up.  It was 17 degrees and falling.  I got my yogurt and frozen dinners and bundled up for the outing and went to the parking lot.  I was early because I thought I might as well get it over and go to bed since no one was coming.  The lot was empty at the driving range where we begin grooming the 4 1/2 mile track but before I got my skis on a couple showed up in a jeep with their skating skis.  There can’t be more than half a dozen pairs of skating skis in this town and now half of them were here.  I brought a headlamp and turned it on but it wasn’t to see anything, it was so people could see me from a few hundred yards away, maybe so they could see how fast I was going, zipping along in the night that was bright enough to see all the shadows of the marks left by skis but not bright enough to tell if a person an eighth of a mile away was me or just a bush.  I did a half mile warm up and came back to find cars starting to arrive.  At ten o’clock we had more than a dozen people tramping around the golf course.  Some had scarves covering their faces but most of them have lived here long enough that they don’t feel the cold the way I do.  My month long growth of beard was worth the itching.  We all went up to the higher part of the track on the hill and scattered according to our abilities.  After an hour I went to the truck where I’d left a gallon thermos of hot water and some powdered hot chocolate.  As the others came down they had a cup and some cookies brought by another club member.  The moon had done its part and now the clouds did theirs by coming in just thick enough to warm the night about 5 degrees but thin enough to leave the ground bright.  It was a thoroughly distracting evening.  What I was distracted from was a lesson I should have prepared for the 9 am teachers quorum.  In the morning, after too little sleep, all I could come up with besides reading the manual was a picture I found in a box of pictures from my father’s house.  It was of my parents, my brother, and me as a baby, sitting in deck chairs on the Queen Mary in June of 1949, coming to America from England.  I passed it around to the 14 and 15 year olds and got nearly no reaction to something I thought was the coolest picture around.  It had no relevance, of course, to the lesson.  I was just stalling.  On another occasion, during a lesson on obedience, I passed around a picture of me lying on the ground as a nearly 10 year old, covered with blood and surrounded by paramedics, police, parents, and horrified onlookers.  It was after I broke my leg.  That picture got a much more satisfying reaction from the group.  “This is what happens when you disobey your father when he tells you to stay on the trail.”   I still need ideas for next week’s lesson