I have no idea what made me think of this today, but while I was washing off the patio, for some reason I remembered one of the posters I had as a kid, and with a bit of searching found an image of it online. The copyright may be held by a company called Western Graphics, but they don’t seem to be in business any longer.
In the ’70s I lived in an old house in a small town. We had converted the attic into a living space, and I lived there. All told, the house was probably about 3,500 feet, not including an unfinished basement. So the attic was relatively large, with steep roofs and three dormers. Air vents ran along the ceiling and the floor near one wall. So the guy that finished it for us had to do all kinds of creative work to encase beams and ducts and structural supports.
One slanted wall was about 12 feet wide and rose to an apex of about 14 feet. Across from it another wall dropped straight down about six feet before making a 90 turn to the flat ceiling of the rest of the room.
On the big, slanted wall, I mounted a number of posters, this moon castle being one. On the opposite wall — because, well, you know, I was cool — I installed an 18″ fluorescent blacklight.
I had a number of bean bag chairs and would spend many a day sprawled across them reading science fiction and military history books (I know…hard to remember the days before the internet).
By night — often with my friends — we’d turn off the white lights and lay on those bean bags staring up at the posters looming over us, talking about life and the world as teenagers understood it.
This poster, though, was always my favorite. I would stare at it many a night wondering about its story and the many stories that unfolded within it. The kings and queens that reigned there, the dragons that flew over it, the knights that fought for it, the peasants that stared at it with envy.
Probably sounds like a starting point for a fantasy writer, but beyond this poster, fantasy has never been my thing.
Not sure why I thought of this today. It’s a mystery how our brain works and some memories forgotten for decades come back in a rush. But there you have it: The moon castle…
