Overture (Earth Song)

Overture (Earth Song) Read Free

Book: Overture (Earth Song) Read Free
Author: Mark Wandrey
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swashbuckling adventures to discover lost treasures. The truth of archeological study had quickly sobered the twenty-year-old Boston girl. Two semesters with her nose buried in ancient history texts followed by a boiling hot summer in Mexico digging through what had been a Mayan garbage dump ended her affair with archeology.
    Next came architectural engineering. The thought of her name on bridges, towers and other lasting monuments was attractive. This field lasted almost a year, just like the last one. A month long internship spent copying and re-measuring drawings at an architectural firm near the university ended that line of study just as effectively as the Mayan dump had ended the other. She realized that there was little chance she would ever design famous buildings or gain any renown. Two years of college were gone and Mindy Patoy had yet to find her future career.
    As she rode the elevator down to the basement parking garage, a smile stole its way onto her face. She was remembering the trip when she found both her first love, and her second love. Her then boyfriend had talked her into joining him for a month during the summer that he spent as student intern at the Mt. Laguna Observatory outside San Diego. She had considered it a foolish waste of time but went along anyway because she was falling in love.
    Students were not supposed to bring animals or girlfriends along on these trips, but she was not the only uninvited guest at the intern’s lodge that summer. Many of the interns did not sleep alone. To her boyfriend’s chagrin he slept alone while she slept in a cot a few feet away. He spent his evenings watching a screen displaying the image captured by the 24” telescope; she sat next to him and kept him company while catching up on her magazine reading. She remembered silently thanking God she’d never taken astronomy.
    Then something startling happened. The telescope focused on the Great Crab Nebula for quick image clarification adjustment. The nebula was nearby and the brightest object available. When Mindy glanced up from her month-old copy of People magazine the large high definition LCD screen showed the distant nebula in all its spectacular detail. Her jaw dropped and her magazine slid to the floor unnoticed. “What is that?!” she asked in awe.
    “ A nebula,” he had told her with the indifference of someone who had seen it a hundred times.
    “ It’s beautiful,” she said, moving even closer to take in the entire image. He lifted an eyebrow and used the computer to call up some archived images from the observatory’s logs. Her breath came in gasps and her eyes got so wide they hurt. Some of the images she had seen before, but never in this large or sophisticated of a display. The images were breathtaking. She was hooked.
    As the days of her boyfriend’s internship passed, she was inexplicably drawn into the wonders of astronomy. Hours after he left the observatory she was still there, sitting with the next shift of interns, watching what they did and reading their books. Two weeks later she'd learned more about astronomy than her boyfriend had learned in two years. The summer internship ended and he left without her. Mindy was granted her own internship at the observatory. A month later she changed her college to the University of San Diego, and her major to Astronomy. She had finally found her passion. “Wonder what ever happened to that boy,” she thought as she climbed into her aging car and drove from the garage. Being a customs broker wasn’t so bad. It was certainly better than working for a living.
    The streets of Portland were nearly deserted, as would be expected on a late Sunday evening. As she pulled onto I-5 and aimed her car south she heaved a sigh of relief to be heading home. The house they'd shared for a few months was only ten miles south of downtown, but it was far enough to make for comfortable rural living. Knowing Jake was there with her made it even more enjoyable. For

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