Passage II

Stargazing

One clear January night when I was eight years old, I had went stargazing with my father. We tramped through the snow in the backyard, then turned our faces upward. The cold air was crisp and clear, the stars brilliant against the black sky. Our breath appeared white above us.

[1]"And there's his sword also, see?" [2] He pointed out Orion to me, the first constellation I would know, the first commencement of a beginning of a lifelong enchantment with the stars. [3] "Megan, there's Orion's belt," Dad said, he kneeled so I could spot the unmistakable row of three stars, perfectly aligned, at the end, of his pointing index finger. [4] Looking at the sword he showed me, I nodded in the dark as the winter sky reoriented itself forever in my mind meanwhile this celestial marker, Orion. (23)

I was eager to learn as much as I could from my father. The Big Dipper was next, with its grand sweep of handle and bowl. Then came the Pleiades, a tight cluster of stars that created a bold smudge of noticeable light above overhead. I absorbed the information he shared: the order of the planets in our solar system, the shapes of galaxies, theories about how the universe began.

For example, all that space and distance fascinated me. It takes light more than eight minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth, I learned. I tried to imagine the distance involved in a light-year, and failed. I was amazed to find out that some of the stars I gazed at were really visual ghosts of stars; their light took so long to travel to my eyes that the stars had long ago burned out. I couldn't take in ideas so incomprehensibly big, but the effort was invigorating, like sledding down a steep hill or racing my sister across a snowy field.

I live on my own now, but last week I was at my parents' house, and I again went outside one more time again to gaze at the night sky. I looked up into the dark at the thin slice of moon near the horizon, the steady glow of the planets, the twinkle of the stars in their familiar formations. (30)