Archive for December, 2010

Louisiana fall colors. Don't worry...I'll find some star pictures soon enough.

I’ve always been a child of wonder…interested in astronomy as far back as I can remember, lugging my telescope outside when I was ten, but I never saw the night sky as a collection of celestial objects. Yes, I saw Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, even star clusters and the moon, but never like somebody had painted them on a black backdrop. It seemed too simple an explanation…even though when I was young, my parents assured me that’s what had happened. Somehow, I knew they were wrong, maybe even afraid reality might frighten me.
Whatever they said, I always saw it as part of my neighborhood and reveled in the sweep and majesty of the glow arching above, clouds of stars, so many and so distant they had lost their individual luster and billowed like incandescent cotton candy. Grateful to be out on a delicate arm of our spiral, I knew if we were closer to the center, our nights would be brilliant, but with the stars lost in glare, and in my opinion, bright nights without the company of stars would be much less thrilling…boring actually.
Maybe it came from observing the Andromeda Galaxy, but I never saw ours as an interesting bunch of glowing stuff in the dark sky. Just like I knew exactly where I lived when I looked up the street toward the center of town, I knew exactly where I lived in our galaxy when I looked at its central star cluster and the gigantic whorl we’re a part of but only see edge-wise. You know, perhaps it’s best…seeing it that way. Otherwise, it might be too scary to appreciate it the way we should.
When I was stargazing, every now and then meteors streaked across the sky, but I didn’t see them as shooting stars. To me they were leftovers from our solar system’s infancy, specks of dust, occasionally rocks and the foolish debris left by comets, our occasional visitors from far beyond even Pluto. I’ve mentioned it before, but one night I saw a really big one, the biggest I’ve ever seen…probably ever will see.
I’m not about to swear to it, but I think it made a sizzling sound. Darkness suddenly vanished, and I watched a searing, white, scar-like trail streaking above me while night became a silvery shade of day. When it got close to the horizon, it broke into reddish-orange cinders raining down somewhere out in the gulf. My buddy thought it was a nuclear attack; it took me the rest of the evening to reassure him.
I grew up in a very small town in which everybody knew about my interest in astronomy…and my reflector telescope, the only one around. That bakelite four-incher got me a lot of invitations…to talk to groups, point out constellations, and demonstrate some of the more interesting things crawling overhead in the blackness. One time, though, it was a little more than I could handle.
The Girl Scouts were having some kind of regional campout in the park just outside of town, and they asked me to come and share what I knew…and could find for them in the sky. Luckily, it was a cloudless, moonless night, and the stars were beautiful. Surrounded by the entire group, I was changing the eyepiece on my treasured telescope when I accidentally dropped it into the grass.
“Does anybody have a flashlight?” I asked. Now, THAT’S something you should never ask a Girl Scout…a Boy Scout either…NO KIND of scout! Instantly, a hundred flashlights came on, all pointing at me. I found my eyepiece and cleaned it off, but it took about fifteen minutes before my eyes adjusted enough to find them anything with the telescope.
Our neighborhood, our incredible, starry neighborhood…it’s lovely up there and endlessly fascinating, but not just up there in the sky. We have little souvenirs down here on Earth, tidbits left to tantalize us ever since it all began…reminding us who we are, where we come from, and what we’re made of…not only flesh and bone…stuff we’ve never even dreamed of…stuff born in a star.
If you don’t believe me, just look at your car keys. They’re made of METAL. Oh, yes, people mined the ore and smelted it, but HOW DID IT COME TO BE IN THE FIRST PLACE? You may be surprised to learn it came from a star, probably a lot bigger than our sun, but it isn’t there any more; it blew up. All the metal and heavy elements we use every day were produced inside a blazing nuclear furnace hanging in limitless space God knows how long ago.
All stars draw their energy from fusion and produce progressively heavier elements as they age. Their only problem comes when they start producing iron, which turns out to be a dead end. They can’t fuse it into anything, so deprived of fuel, they slowly begin to cool and expand. In time, they collapse inward then explode as a supernova, showering space with zillions of tons of material…in light so bright it can be seen millions of light-years away.
Much later…if we’re lucky…like a phoenix, a new star is born from the remnants, and as it announces its gravitational pull, disks of material begin to aggregate and form planets, circling, busily gathering up a smorgasbord of ejected elements. Like the other solid planets, we got a lot of them, but only Earth was fortunate enough to be in the “Goldilocks Zone,” EXACTLY the right place where life could develop, use them…and hopefully, learn and appreciate how all this came about.
There’s unbelievable wonder in our little car keys…their metal born in an unimaginably powerful and destructive event and gathered over eons by our patient, primordial Earth. On exceptionally clear nights when I was a boy, I used to say, “It almost feels like you can touch them,” and now I know. You can…whenever you like…you have star-stuff in your pocket.

I wrote this a few years ago. My father loved it, and when he died, I put a copy in his casket, a sentimental gesture, yes…but I think he knows what I was trying to tell him. Like most fathers and sons, we had many differences over the years, some serious, some painful, some only fun, but with his help, often as an adversary, I learned who I really was.
I wasn’t dad’s favorite, not by any stretch of imagination. Maybe that’s why I tried so hard…and why I bucked him so eagerly, but the opposite is probably closer to the truth. Maybe he wasn’t all that crazy about me BECAUSE I bucked him. I had to be ME, even when I was SURE my ideas would piss him off…which they usually did.
It was only when further conflict was no longer possible that I learned how deep his love actually ran…a lot deeper than I thought at the time.  The years since and life in general have shown me what I felt then wasn’t really important…or even relevant. This is for you, Dad, in a way, an apology for being a pain in the ass; I love you. Whatever happened between us in the past couldn’t possibly change the way I feel…the way I know I always will.
NOVEMBER AIR
Sometimes the strangest things trigger a flood of memories, maybe nothing more than light shimmering through a window at a particular angle or the bitter taste of cold November air. Fall, particularly, is like that for me. When the air is crisp and clear and the nights cold enough to send you scrambling for an extra blanket, memories of long ago come streaming back into my head.
I remember a winter weekend we spent at our camp below New Iberia. Dad was anxious for me to prove myself on the skeet range…improvised in a meadow next to the boat house, nothing like a real range, but we loved it. I stood at a little table covered with a mountain of shell boxes, my treasured sixteen gauge in my hands. I love that gun, a gift from dad, still have it; it’s part of who I am.
I don’t really remember who was loading the trap. All I remember is the constant, “PULL” then gunshots and the smell of gunpowder. I think I destroyed a case of clay pigeons that day, and of course, there was the inevitable critique. “You’re leading them too much…and don’t fire so quickly…AIM.” Dad was like that…a tough critic, but I must say I acquitted myself pretty well that bright, chilly, wonderful afternoon; I hit at least nine out of ten. That’s better than he could do.
That night I slept on crisp sheets smelling of sunlight…after a superb meal, with only the playful music of crickets and frogs out near the waterline to amuse me, no TV, not even radio. Nestled in a warm, comforting bed with a reassuring blanket at my feet, I knew I’d be the first one up in the morning, early when it was still dark, to start a roaring fire. If I didn’t, I knew breakfast would be late, the rest of my family would be mad…and I’d be ravenous until nine or ten. It was MY JOB to get the place ready for morning.
Getting up to start the fire while the rest of the camp was still snug and mindlessly asleep was always a special time for me. Everything was impossibly quiet, and alone and undistracted, I could listen to my thoughts undisturbed. I often stole outside to watch stars parading through the dark autumn sky…silently, brilliantly, wonderfully, perpetually, and standing there beneath the bright Milky Way, I stood in awe until shivering, I returned to the fireplace and got things going.
A lifelong boy scout, I always started with choicest kindling, slowly adding larger bits of wood until I could throw in logs I knew would last for hours…before quietly climbing the staircase and sliding back into my bed. When I went back to sleep, the only thing I could hear was the fire crackling and growing downstairs. The sheets, so clean they felt sharp, told me. I was needed, I was valuable…I was loved.
The years have distanced me from those memories, and I’ve come to know not everyone finds such confirmation. All families are different, and I’ve learned many souls have enjoyed almost no love in their formative years and bitterly resent that part of their lives. My heart goes out to them, and I wish somehow I could undo it for them…but I can’t. Attractive as the thought is, it’s impossible to reach into the past and reverse cruel quirks of fate…like having to live the hand you’ve been dealt.

All I can do is mourn for them, feel sadness, and thank God I wasn’t one of them. When I was growing up, there was no greater validation than those sheets, that camp, my sixteen gauge, and that happy, noisy fire. I can still smell it, even after all these years. Surely, no one has felt more contentment and love than I did that weekend I bit the cold November air and blasted a case of clay pigeons into a murky Louisiana bayou.