Lost In Place Read Free

electric heating blanket over the engine of our Volkswagen (otherwise it wouldn’t start in the winter) before his hour-long commute, he came into the house to savor a final moment of warmth and said to no one in particular, “Back to the salt mines.” I overheard this and went on to announce during show-and-tell that my daddy worked underground; on the back of my report card that year my teacher, who knew that my father was not a miner, wrote, “I worry that sometimes Mark seems to be in his own little world.”
    She was right. I
was
in my own little world, and it consisted mostly of daydreaming to pass the time until Daddycame home from work. For me that was when real life began, because I adored my gloomy father. He was fairly strict, did not care for board games, owned no power tools and had no interest in sports, but he was great company. Aristotle observed that melancholy men are the most witty, to which I would add that they are also the most fun to confide in. For much of my young life I enjoyed nothing better than to help him forget about his awful day at work by telling him about my awful day at school, and this usually led to a good meandering conversation. Sometimes we talked sitting on the living-room floor because that was where he painted, with half of his materials in boxes scattered all around him and the other half ground into the rug. On weekends we talked in the car on the way to the town dump, to the hardware store, to the Volkswagen dealer or to my Youth Symphony rehearsals in Norwalk. If the weather was too awful, he would declare it a Green Blanket Day, pull out an ancient, tattered green blanket, throw it on one of our collapsed sofas, make cinnamon toast and tea for Erich, Rachel and me and spend the day napping there with us and telling stories. Occasionally I joined him for his morning walk around the dairy farm near our house because I could count on his wanting to chat rather than keep his mind on exercise, which he hated. Most of all, though—and most enjoyable of all—we talked under the stars during our astronomy sessions.
    Sensing I might be an eager disciple, my dad started me on the hobby as soon as I was old enough to stay awake past eight o’clock. My earliest childhood memory is of his taking me out to a cold field in the middle of the night to see comet Ikeya-Seki. This was in 1965. From its bright starlike head to the end of its frosty tail it measured overthirty million miles, which represents one third of the distance from the earth to the sun. The comet glowed so brightly in the cold night air that the cows standing near us looked like ghostly worshipers, forming icons of their deity with their own breath. As we stamped our feet to keep warm, my father told me that comets were really not much more than snowballs, and that each time they passed by the sun they melted a little. “In a few hundred million years,” he said, “that comet we’re looking at will melt completely, and the dust from the tail will be blown by the solar wind out into the space between the stars.”
    One reason, I think, that conversations while stargazing can be so memorable is that you can’t really see your companion’s face. You can only hear his voice while staring up into the darkness, which brings the words into unusually sharp focus. When I asked my dad what would happen to the dust from the tail after it got blown out of the solar system, he said, “Well, gravity might catch it and pull it into a huge cloud of other kinds of dust, and then it would become a new star or planet. Or it might drift out in space forever.”
    “How can it drift forever?”
    He paused before answering, “Nobody knows, really. But you’ll have a better idea once you get a job.”
    Ironically, the one job my dad talked about with enthusiasm required drifting in space; he knew the names of all the astronauts, and considered every one of them a hero. Not surprisingly, when I was seven years old (around the middle