And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
--W. B. Yeats
Some experts say that July and January are the best months for sky-watching. At those times, they say, the planets are brighter, meteor showers are more visible, and familiar constellations hang higher and longer in the clear air of the darkened heavens. Having been a sometime watcher of the sky for many years, I pinpointed a bright night last July and hauled out the old brass telescope as an aid to searching once again the craters on the face of the full moon and delving into the black spaces around and beyond.
By dumb luck or by providential intervention, our lakeside lot is so situated that the moon rises directly in front, across the cove and above the trees, its round shape shattering and scattering out along the water path that ends at my feet as I sit dangling them off the dock. Occasionally, a duck batallion will cut across the reflection, or the great blue heron that lives farther up the cove will flap, croaking, into the night light. Here, too, we are away from city lights that can diffuse and obscure an otherwise crystalline sky. There couldn’t be a better theatre for the moonrise, this longest running of plays with casting by Mother Nature.
Interest in the moon, planets, and stars began very early in my childhood. Without conditioned air and the lure of television to keep us inside, lulling and dulling our senses by the glow and endless “commern” (my grandmother’s madeup word for undefined noise) coming from that tube, we spent warm evenings outside my home on Rogers Street in Fort Worth, Texas, often on our backs in the grass, picking out the Dippers and, as we had been shown, trying to trace the way from the Big Dipper to the North Star. We gazed up at Scorpio whose poisonous tail twisted low on the southwest horizon, pointed out the hunter, Orion, with his bright, studded belt, and marvelled at the moon in all of its phases.
Often we had a tube of another kind to catch our interest-the brass telescope-that brought the sky bodies in close, the better to observe their wonders. The telescope belonged to Mr. Will Winton, long-time professor of geology at Texas Christian University, where my father was professor of biology. After Mr. Winton’s death, the telescope was passed to my father, who continued to use it, as he had on numerous past occasions, to entertain and instruct his classes in General Science.
As I took the telescope out on this recent July night and began to assemble it, my eyes welled as unbidden memories came of those magic summer nights under magic summer skies with the magician-professor-father leading the way to and beyond the moon, back and beyond the beginning of known time, through and beyond the silences of space to possibilities far, far out and away.
That the telescope came to me after my father’s death seems right. It was an instrument of special fascination in my youth and no less now. On some nights, after the supper dishes were done and Mother and Grandma Georgie were sitting quietly on the front porch that ran the width of our house listening to the soft voices and laughter of other “porchers,” and my sister and I and perhaps a neighbor child or two were in endless pursuit of “lightnin’ bugs,” Daddy would bring out the long wooden box that held the viewing parts of the telescope, erect the wooden spike-legged tripod onto which the cylinder was screwed, and amidst “oh boys” and shy, awe-filled looks, would set about to prepare the stage. I must have been very small when I first looked through the scope’s tunnel, for I remember having to stand on a chair, or Daddy lifting me and holding me on his raised knee to reach the eyepiece.
The natural inclination for a two-eyed human creature when faced with a one-eyed viewing apparatus is to close one eye, squinty-tight, and look with the other. Daddy taught us to view with both eyes open. For a while, I saw two moons, two Jupiters, and two of everything else heavenward until I got the hang of it. Since then I’ve always thought that those who view one-eyed, only see half the picture. What we actually saw through this extraordinary pipe was no more uncommon than that which other casual observers of the night sky see: the moon, Jupiter, Venus, the North Star, the Pleiades, the Milky Way.
What does seem a little less common to me, though, is the way in which we were given to see, the opportunity-although we didn’t realize it then- to be taught not just the physiognomy of the universe and our particular solar system, but also to catch the moonbeams and starshine of other worlds, of other possibilities, and the sheer miracle of it all.
The teacher made the common uncommon; the teacher unshuttered the window through which we saw not only a lighted moon in a darkened sky, but also got some glimpse of why it hung there just so, and from whence came the light; the teacher taught us to perceive the imperceptible movement of the stars; the teacher taught us to see through our eyes with our minds. He couldn’t tell us all he knew-we were too young and couldn’t have grasped it-but he did point the way. He made us look, want to look, for the picture behind the picture behind the picture.
And so still, on full-moon nights, I test the prisms’ strength, adjusting for a little more power, coaxing a little more vision that might unlock the mysteries I know are there. We discovered them, the scope and I, many moons ago, when we were young.
©1992 Joan Hewatt Swaim