When I was in my early twenties, my New Orleans yahoo friends and I had a favorite past time. When we weren't traipsing around the French Quarter, we'd often take a friend's old VW hippie van out to a quarry near the Pearl River, which skirts the border between Louisiana and Mississippi. There, far from the city lights, we could see stars by the millions, and we'd lie on our backs all night long just talking and watching the cosmic light show that seemed as close to us as our hands in front of our faces.
Lately my mind has drifted back to those magical times, and I find myself wondering when the last time was that I raised my eyes toward the night sky. The trials and travails of daily life here on Terra Firma keep me so earthbound, I'm reminded of a line from the movie Men in Black: "The stars...they really are beautiful you know. We never just look at them any more."
I recall how we could make out entire constellations so easily, without hardly trying, as if God had painted them up there just for our entertainment. Scorpio with its looping stinger tail, and the Libra scales -- they were all there for the viewing, all changing from season to season. These days the demands of work, family, and other responsibilities keep my eyes and attention focused on Earthly things, having taken the place of the magic in the night sky that had once fixated me so. Seldom now do I take the time to look up at the night sky -- but they are still beautiful.
As a boy I had two reflector-type telescopes mounted on tripods, and I remember the utter fascination I had viewing the surface of the moon at night, searching for the "Sea of Tranquility" where Neal and Buzz would one day walk. Both of my telescopes had special view-finder fittings that allowed me to attach a camera to the lens and take snaps of whatever images came into the scopes' tubes. (I remember aiming one of the scopes at the Sun one bright day, without any thought of using neutral-density filtration, and how smoke suddenly began to rise from the device. Okay...so it wasn't a genius move!)
These days my mind is focused on work, family, and an unending parade of responsibilities. Perhaps the worst part of growing older is having to leave the fanciful dalliances of one's youth behind. I work at a computer screen now, staring into a black monitor and racking my brain to resolve meaningless issues that present themselves to me as blips of light on a black surface: A far cry from that wondrous star stuff sprinkled across the velvety night sky at the quarry.
Those nights on the Pearl River, lying on our backs with weird music wafting from hidden speakers inside the VW van, and shooting stars streaking by overhead, were the things of my youth that I just don't get to do any more. The world's weight has dragged me down like the gravity of Jupiter itself, and has forced me to keep my nose to the grindstone and my eyes averted away from the stars that had once dazzled me so. It was a different time, life was newer then, and nearly "weightless" by comparison to the load that I carry today.
As Sia Furler sings on her rendition of Under the Milky Way, the bedazzling magic and mystery of the cosmos are the stuff of dreams and daydreams. It's too bad that life eventually comes along and gets in the way. Long after I am gone, those same stars will still be shining on brightly overhead, light years away from this world. Thus I've vowed to myself to pause every now and then and turn my eyes upwards. It's a direct thread back to my former me -- to my younger self -- that somehow got obscured by Life, but that still resides in my heart to this day.
