Anthology
- 1995, Vol. 1
- 1996, Vol. 2
- 1997, Vol. 3
- 1998, Vol. 4
- 1999, Vol. 5
- 2000, Vol. 6
- 2001, Vol. 7
- 2002, Vol. 8
- 2003, Vol. 9
- 2004, Vol. 10
- 2005, Vol. 11
- 2006, Vol. 12
- 2007, Vol. 13
- 2008, Vol. 14
- 2009, Vol. 15
- 2010, Vol. 16
- 2011, Vol. 17
- 2012, Vol. 18
- 2013, Vol. 19
- 2014, Vol. 20
- 2015, Vol 21
- 2016, Vol 22
- 2017, Vol 23
- 2018, Vol 24
- 2019, Vol 25
- Anthology Home
Return to Top
I point. I try to tell my father what I see. But he ignores me. Impatient as always (and ever), he puts me in the car and closes the door. We drive away. End of memory.
At some point in my older young life, the stars lost their colors. I’m not sure when it happened that they ceased to be a collection of colored gems, becoming instead a handful of sugar crystals flung wide on a field of blue/black satin. Those sugar crystals did have names, and the names were beautiful. I sat on the steps at the end of the walk in front of my parents’ house with a flashlight and a National Geographic star map, learning a celestial role call of names like Algol and Polaris, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Sagitta and Altair and the Pleiades. But only one star was any color but blue/white—Antaresm the flaming red heart of Scorpio. And I wondered at times if I only imagined that the stars had once been colors. Maybe I had simply done what children do, manufactured a wonder for myself at an age when life, so barley begun, was too new not to be fabulous.
But now I know I didn’t imagine it.
I have the proof here. This is the Hubble Deep Field, a view not only of space, but of time. It is a dazzling thing, a photo not just of stars but of galaxies spinning away from the center of the universe—and the beginning of time. They are awesome things, those galaxies, each glowing, whirling cluster of countless stars. Surely too, of countless worlds and minds.
But the colors are what catch my eye. All the colors are there, the ones I saw that night from my father’s arms. Yellow, orange and red, with touches of
Electric (astral?) blue and green. Rarest of all, violet. Everywhere I look, color looks back at me from the surprisingly crowded void of space. It is almost as if color began when time began. And it was when my own time began that I was able to see those colors.
Maybe that’s the key, the answer, the missing piece of Why? Now just of why I could see young what I could not see when much older; but of why my father would not listen, would not look—quiet probably, could not see. Perhaps he just did not want to be reminded of how much of his own time had passed—and how much of mine stretched ahead, past his knowing and past his reach.
STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT
It is a fragment of a memory, one of those faint mental snapshots that is so often the first souvenir of early childhood, before words can frame an experience. The impression is a quick one: a cold night, and being carried in my father’s arms to be gotten into or out of a car in a big parking lot full of other cars. But I am not looking at the cars or at my father. I am looking up at the clear night sky. It is full of stars, and the stars are all colors, every color that I have ever seen in my crayon box and some others besides.
I point. I try to tell my father what I see. But he ignores me. Impatient as always (and ever), he puts me in the car and closes the door. We drive away. End of memory.
At some point in my older young life, the stars lost their colors. I’m not sure when it happened that they ceased to be a collection of colored gems, becoming instead a handful of sugar crystals flung wide on a field of blue/black satin. Those sugar crystals did have names, and the names were beautiful. I sat on the steps at the end of the walk in front of my parents’ house with a flashlight and a National Geographic star map, learning a celestial role call of names like Algol and Polaris, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Sagitta and Altair and the Pleiades. But only one star was any color but blue/white—Antaresm the flaming red heart of Scorpio. And I wondered at times if I only imagined that the stars had once been colors. Maybe I had simply done what children do, manufactured a wonder for myself at an age when life, so barley begun, was too new not to be fabulous.
But now I know I didn’t imagine it.
I have the proof here. This is the Hubble Deep Field, a view not only of space, but of time. It is a dazzling thing, a photo not just of stars but of galaxies spinning away from the center of the universe—and the beginning of time. They are awesome things, those galaxies, each glowing, whirling cluster of countless stars. Surely too, of countless worlds and minds.
But the colors are what catch my eye. All the colors are there, the ones I saw that night from my father’s arms. Yellow, orange and red, with touches of
Electric (astral?) blue and green. Rarest of all, violet. Everywhere I look, color looks back at me from the surprisingly crowded void of space. It is almost as if color began when time began. And it was when my own time began that I was able to see those colors.
Maybe that’s the key, the answer, the missing piece of Why? Now just of why I could see young what I could not see when much older; but of why my father would not listen, would not look—quiet probably, could not see. Perhaps he just did not want to be reminded of how much of his own time had passed—and how much of mine stretched ahead, past his knowing and past his reach.