Susie and The Night Sky

I didn't know where to put it, just a little memory

I was ten years old when I first saw the
night sky. Oh, scoff if you wish but it's true. For ten years the "beauty" of the night sky escaped me. Everyone around me talked
often of twinkling stars, star pictures painted
across the velvet blackness of space, and the
moon with a face. Rubbish! These things did
not exist to me. Try as I might, I could not
make the pictures come forth from two or
three blurs nor would the moon shine its
countenance on me.

For ten years I pretended to see bears,
hunters, queens, and scorpions. For ten
years I participated in great intellectual
debates over a face, a rabbit, or an old
woman. For ten years the night sky only
signaled the time to stop the adventure of the day and return home.

In 1963, parents respected teachers. It was a
silly notion. The teacher had gone to school to
learn the finer points of teaching her subject
and thus was viewed as the expert in
pedagogy. That is why Sister Ignatious felt
very comfortable in telling my mother during a
parent and teacher meeting that there was something wrong with my sight and mother was to take me to an optometrist immediately. Today, she would be sued, censured, and fired, but this was 1963, and Mother thanked her for her concern and made the appointment.

By today's standards they were not stylish, actually, by 1963 standards they weren't but the world changed the moment I put them on! The world took on a crispness that was never there before, and the world truly was a much larger place as distance came into focus.

We were playing sandlot ball where the number of innings is dependent on the coming darkness or, in our house, the sight of three stars in the sky. My older brother always took great pride in making this pronouncement. I always looked up and marveled at the magic he must possess. For try as I might I never saw them. He was
always right, he was the Big Brother but I
never understood until that night where the real magic lay. Sounding like Moses leading his people he announced, "Come on, Susie, PJ, it's time to go home. See!" I looked up and there they were, three little stars. Little jewels, they really did look like little jewels. And they twinkled! I must have said this aloud because my brother grabbed me around the neck and pulled me close, squeezed and said in that loving Big Brother way, "Of course they do, you goof!"

From that moment on, I spent hours outside just looking at the stars and the moon with his smiling face. Or was it a rabbit, or maybe and old woman carrying firewood? I love the night sky because for so many years it was lost to me. Oh, I've viewed it through binoculars and telescopes, but if I really want to look at it with the wonder of a ten year old child, I just walk out into the field a gaze upward.