Mystery

At 4:30 this morning Venus and the waning crescent moon were brilliant in the still dark sky, just a few degrees up from the horizon. By 6:00, the sky was light, but they were still faintly visible, Venus just a pinpoint, high in the sky. I never mind waking up at night here because the sky is so amazing if it is even partly clear. 2020 hasn’t been a great year for much, but it has been a great year for seeing the bright planets, with Jupiter and Saturn appearing close together, with Mars so brilliant.

What makes the night sky so fascinating? Certainly, it brings back happy memories of my Mom, a wonderful amateur astronomer. Before the deck was built in Amenia, she would carry her telescope out onto the lawn in the velvet dark summer nights, before anyone was talking about light pollution. She would show us the craters on the moon, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. She would teach us the constellations and their wonderful myths, the stories of Queen Cassiopeia, Orion the hunter, and the Pleiades, sisters like us. In those days, I thought my mother knew everything. It was rare that we asked a question she couldn’t answer, but when we did, she taught us how to find answers long before Google made it so easy.

But I think the fascination with the night sky is much more primitive, an inheritance from early people all over the globe who lived under big dark skies. The sky inspired wonder, imagination, and a quest for knowledge. Animals, plants, rivers and such inspired learning – we needed to understand them and remember what we learned – life depended on it. But all that could be studied with the full range of senses, seen, felt, tasted, touched, and smelled. The learning was immediately practical. The night sky was so different – visible, hugely present, but so mysterious. What was it made of? How did it change and why? Tracking the movements of the stars, moon and planets took patience. And the moon and planets were so strangely different from the stars in their motion. Those differences sent the first star gazers down such wonderful paths of reasoning and imagination, and did so for centuries as astronomy and math grew side by side. And now, understanding a little more about what we’re seeing only makes it more wondrous. There are black holes out there, galaxies beyond counting, exoplanets, stars being born and dying. There is dark matter, and space deforms around massive objects. We know about the speed of light and the age of the universe in theory, but we can scarcely imagine it. The sky still draws imagination and curiosity upward, away from our earth bound lives.

I wonder if my mother used to go up onto the roof of our apartment building in the Bronx when she was young to look at the night sky. Very likely she and my dad would have gone up there when they were courting, but I doubt they were looking at the stars then. That rooftop was a wonderful place, though I was only up there during the day. We moved away before I was old enough to think about going up at night. Mom and I went up to hang out the laundry and to collect and fold it when it was dry. Mom had a big apron with pockets for her wooden clothes pins, and I had my own little version of it for my brightly colored little plastic pins. Almost certainly, my Bubbe had made both of those aprons from some fabric remnants she had scrounged and pieced together. I don’t remember Shayne coming up with us. Perhaps she did, and I’ve forgotten, or perhaps she stayed on the third floor to keep an eye on the little girls. In my memory, laundry was a job Mom and I did together, and by the time we moved to Mamaroneck that was definitely the case, although it was dryers in the laundry room rather than clothes lines on a wondrous roof there.

The roof was above the fifth floor. At the top of the stairs there was, in my memory, a massive metal door – probably too heavy for me to open alone. I loved those trips to the roof. It was a magical place. There was a wall around the edge, perhaps three feet high, and similar, slightly lower walls between the buildings, with metal stairs that we could climb over to reach the roof of the adjacent buildings. We could look down at the little people, cars and trees five stories below. We could see over a great expanse of Bronx Park. But as much as anything, I loved the time alone with my mom. In a family with four girls, that was a rare and precious treat. And I loved having a job, hanging the socks and underwear and Dad’s handkerchiefs. I can still feel the stiffness of air dried handkerchiefs. I can still smell the rooftop tar and hear the crunch of gravel underfoot. The rooftop was wonderfully different from the rest of the tangible world, but the mysteries of the rooftop were nothing compared to the mysteries of the sky above it.