Thinking of the Stars

Hi==today I am thinking of the stars, and how people used to be so familiar with that glorious canopy over our sleeping heads...and how we can hardly see them any more.

When I went out to get the paper at six o'clock, there were about five or six stars up there.  The same ones that are always there, the biggest ones.  All the rest are obscured by a screen of reflected city light.

I remember when Alex was three or four, I went into his room in the middle of the night. He was sitting in his window sill, and when I asked him what he was doing out of bed, he said, "I was just looking at the beau-ti-ful stars."  I am glad there were still some middle of the night stars to be seen in San Diego in the early sixties.  The color of the night sky as I'll always remember it was rose-color.  When I wrote a story set in our neighborhood, I described the fox's water (a tub I'd set down in the canyon during the dry spell) as "gleaming like an opal" under the night sky.  A rose-colored opal.

Once when Ben was very small, perhaps a year old but no more, we went camping at Ocotillo.  He was sleeping in my sleeping bag, as protection against the mountain lions and scorpions. Hah.  I woke in the night, and he was sitting up beside me.  When I said hi, he said not a word for he could not speak yet, but he pointed his baby pointer finger up at a night sky too glorious for any words. I am not sure that either he or I have seen anything to compare with it since.

When I was a girl, the young used to run around barefooted at night, playing massive games of hide and seek that might span blocks...when we got tired we threw ourselves down on the Faulks' carpet grass and watched the stars until it was time to go home.  I am glad we had a familiarity with that wonderful phenomenon then.  Now, it's so nearly gone from our lives that wise people are trying to set out "parks", intentionally darkened areas from which watchers can get some glimpse of the glory overhead.

They say that our infrastructure is going. That will surely take some getting used to, but I am secretly comforted to know that  Wakan Tanka has a pleasant and profound surprise for us when the grid is gone. YAZZYBEL