Moon below the masthead

Front page and center Cleveland Plain Dealer -- odd placement for the sci fi book jacket, no? Small faces gape at a huge shimmering moon with crescent chin, sloped nose and lowered lashes. Over this photo hangs a quote:

Since the day of the operation, I have a face like everybody else.

I tear my eyes from the picture and leave for work, baffled. The full featured moon conjures up Virgin Mary's face discovered on a steelyard's rusted tankard 50 miles from no place. Devotees flock to see her.

And the caption.

Since the day of the operation, I have a face like everybody else.

Here's where the sci fi kicks in. Aliens with laser toys replace pockmarked Man in the Moon with smooth Lady Luna -- quite the operation.

The debate about intelligent design and evolution comes to mind. I wonder if both explanations of our origins will some day seem as strange as alien invasions in front page stories. What if Darwin's theories end up like some of Galileo's, eclipsed by Einstein? I revere the scientists, disciplined visionaries of matter, space and time. They forbear the nudgy matron saint of factoids, hold the world accountable to proof. They pack a spare cerebrum full of data. But surely every good professor knows she's but a footprint on the Everest.

And what explains the picture in the paper? A story of an ordinary earthling, Isabelle Dinoire, and her doctors who stitched a stranger's chin where hers had been -- and cheeks, and lips and nostrils. My moon is her projection, my aliens her surgeons, my bafflement her miracle evolving.