Night Sky

My son and I have gotten in the habit of walking together for an hour or so early in the evening; these days when we go the sun has already set, and this week the moon has been rising in time to accompany us, or was, until last night. The reason for going is, ostensibly, to take the dog. Because he's nearly nine, he needs the exercise now more than ever, needs to keep moving so that he will be able to keep moving. But the truth is that I need to go, too, and physical health isn't the half of it. Someone told me that every hour you walk adds another hour to your life. I pass this information along to my son, and in turn we consider whether that might translate as well to the dog's life, and in that case, is it dog hours and dog years they'd be talking about? We don't know. We do know that everyone has more energy as a result of these walks, we're all losing a little weight, we all sleep more soundly at night. It's good for us, good for our bodies and good for our heads, too. And it's good for the two of us to have some time by ourselves: in our household, my older child, a girl, tends to dominate the conversation. I was an eldest child too and never really thought about what it was like for my sister to occupy the seat of youngest child, or didn't think about it until I saw how the dynamic winds itself out between my own two children. These nights are also giving me a more intimate understanding of how the young male mind winds its own self out, me, who grew up in an entirely female universe, no father, no brothers, just one bad-tempered grandfather who did us all the favor of dying on the young side (mercifully so, as his dementia was beginning to get dangerous, or so I thought later, when I was older and could understand what had been going on during those years). Once I watched during a long sweaty August afternoon as he walked slowly back and forth, back and forth, past the two windows of the living room where I sat. Finally he came into the house, wiping his bald head and complaining bitterly about how damned hot it was, trying to mow the lawn just now. But of course, he hadn't been pushing a lawn mower at all, had just been walking back and forth and back again in the blazing summer sun. Later that month, he laid down on the couch in the morning and my grandmother, pausing at the top of the stairs, turned her head for a moment in time to hear the death rattle in his throat.

So, these nights I walk around the back streets of our town for an hour or so with my son, and he talks, and the dog rambles, and while I never hear much about how the day went for him, my son does like to talk about the things that are most heavily on his mind--those things gain their heft, I believe, precisely because he is afraid to talk about them. So he monologues about his belief in ghosts, wants to know whether he's descended from people with unusual psychic abilities, talks about how he's torn between becoming a brain researcher, or becoming a cryptozoologist. I think to myself that he must get that from the distaff side, as they used to say--his father was a pragmatist, a logical guy, really my intellectual opposite-but-equal. I wonder what my son's ideal partner will look like. I do know that right now, the girl who has become his first real crush is also the only student in his accelerated classes who is consistently able to edge him out, grade-wise. So we know he likes smart women. When he talks to me about her at all, which is admittedly very little, what he seems to like about her most is that she's nice to him. I like that too, kids who are nice to my kids.

While we walk and he rambles in his conversation and the dog rambles around with his nose pressed to the ground--the dog so single-minded that last night I watched him walk smack into a tree while he chased, nose down, the trail of some irresistible scent or another--my own thoughts like to escape a little bit as they can, when there's a lull in the conversation, or when my son seems more like he needs to get the words out than that he requires any response from me. The painter Paul Klee said that drawing is like--or that it's only, I can never remember which--taking a line out for a walk. Which is exactly what I think writing is, it's simply taking a thought out for a walk, and the best way to walk it around is to get out there walking yourself. It's what's always worked best for me, anyway, and it's something I discover all over again every time I pick the habit back up. I've walked a lot over the years, and I always wish that I walked even more, even when I'm walking an hour every day the way I have been lately. It really is a peculiar form of worship, I suppose, meditation and magic and conjuring and inner work and outer work, all in one basic and repetitive motion. Last night I noticed that my legs felt so strong, I thought I could probably start to run and not tire out. I wonder if eventually, I might feel so strong beyond that, that I'll think I could probably fly?

In the years before I went to college, my mother, sister and I lived in a house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town a block over from the river, and I walked constantly then. Constantly, and often at night, or very early in the morning. Anyway I spent a good many hours traveling through the dark, and never felt unsafe nor, I'm sure, was I. I do remember my mother telling me that, if I grew up and moved to a city, that was going to be the one thing for sure I'd miss, being able to walk around freely at night. The irony was that in the place I lived for the past decade, I never could walk at night, precisely because it was too rural. There were fisher cats there, and the occasional bear, but most of all there were no streetlights on any of the roads around me, so if the wildlife didn't get you, the careening cars with their night-blind drivers most likely would. I walked a lot in that town, but always in daylight.

And for many years prior to that I worked nights, so wasn't walking then, either, and now that I've started taking night walks again my first thought is always, why did I ever stop doing this, until the second thought comes along and reminds me, that's just the way life has been. But I'm back to it now, and the same night sky is there to walk beneath, the same night air is there to breath. One difference is having a child along for the journey. Once both of my kids were too afraid of the dark to ever want to go outside at night even, for instance, the year we lived in New Hampshire and the comet came. Sometimes they'd look at it through a bedroom window. My daughter is still nervous about the dark; my son is learning to be a little more at ease there. Lately in his Earth Science class they've been studying their astronomy unit, and that helps with his curiosity. At night we go out, and if the moon isn't up yet and the big stadium lights at the sports complex aren't blazing away, we get a good look at the starry field of the autumn sky. He can find Polaris; he can pick out the subtle shape of Cepheus and the winding path that is the constellation Draco. He is always curious about the planets. And last night, because it was just setting, I was able to show him the constellation Sagittarius. He had just been explaining to me the reason we can't see the mad explosion of stars that lies at galactic core. I pointed to Sagittarius and told him there, if you look off in that direction, that's where the center of the galaxy, the one you can't see, lies...

It is no small feat, I think, to be able to orient yourself even in that small way, in the midst of such vast distances.

When we were a few blocks from home last night, on the way back, I looked up to the north and the east and there in the sky hung a star I'd missed before. It shone vividly like Venus shines, although I know right now, Venus is coming at us in the morning; it glittered there so impossibly bright I wondered for a moment how I'd managed to miss it just a few minutes before, when we'd been standing along the corn field on the side of an unlit road. In fact I opened my mouth to say just that, how did I miss pointing this one out to you?--but Wyatt was talking, I wanted to figure out just what it was I was looking at, and in the seconds that elapsed then the bright star suddenly began to fade, as though thin clouds were passing between me and it. But the sky was cloudless last night, the star simply faded back into quiet star commonness, and afterwards, I was left wondering what exactly it was I'd just seen--a variable star? An aircraft of some sort? A trick of the night and my 48-year-old eyes? I want it to have been something rare and lucky, something that is so unusual to see that science can't predict it and you're only likely to have seen it if your gaze just happened to have been wandering across that particular place at just that particular time. I want this to have been something that earned me a new celestial star setinto my earthly crown.

These morning it's still dark when I begin my day, and this is the time of year when the old Celtic method of reckoning a day as the period that occurs between sunset and sunset makes a lot more intuitive sense. Today I put the dog outside early, as I always do, and looked for the moon which is directly overhead in the predawn sky right now. I used to look at the moon a lot, same as I used to walk at night a lot, and I miss having those particular roads unwind ahead of me, as well. Let me describe to you what the moon was doing this morning: directly around her waning gibbous form there was a reflected halo of light, this one tinged, improbably, with purple, with green. Farther out in a big sweep that took up a good third of the visible sky, was a vast and perfectly-formed white circle of light, looking for all the world like an enormous ring of snow was bounding the moon at its center. In fact someone told me that the appearance of such a ring means it's going to snow; I have also heard that if you count the number of stars inside the ring, it is the number of friends who are soon to die. I hope that's not the case, since this morning's count was five or six. I think that the bad omens that come along with these phenomena are more a reflection of the fear we feel when confronted with the moon- and starlit parts of our interior lives. I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little afraid of that, but I do think that once you go there, you start to fear it less. It helps to have someone to travel along with you, too, I think. A companion, and the chance to be by turns chattering, silent, rambling, snuffling, imagining, thinking, learning to locate the center of the galaxy, learning to be at home in your dark corner of it.