Blinded by Starlight

Too often when I was a kid, I tended to ignore a lot of things people were saying to me. Or if not "ignore," at least laugh it off as some sort of joke. It wasn't until several decades later that I came to understand the prescience of these people and what they had to say, no matter how they said it.

Of course I doubt very much they fully understood what they were saying at the time, either.

There was my Uncle Tom, who told me when I was 12 that I should start learning Braille right away. He may be the only one who did know what he was talking about, given that he shared the same genetic condition I had (though I wouldn't learn that for another 10 years).

There were all those kids in junior high who spread and believed the rumor that I was reading as much as I was because I was going blind, and wanted to cram as much into my head before I did. In reality I was just looking for convenient ways to ignore them.

Then there was Mr. Walker, my ninth-grade science teacher. He was an odd duck. A tall, thin man with wavy gray hair, glasses and a droopy, Lemmy-style moustache. Though fairly softspoken much of the time, he was prone to surprising fits of anger, possessed an unusually sharp and cruel sense of humor and was in the habit of leaping over his desk in the middle of class for reasons none of us could quite figure out. He was a good science teacher, but a bit of a right-wing kook who often applied his political beliefs to what he was teaching.

(Strange, but the above description, as I think about it, applies equally well to any number of teachers I've had over the years.)

He argued, for instance, that anyone could survive a thermonuclear blast simply by throwing themselves down next to a curb. "It'll pass right over you, no problem," he said. He was also?perhaps this just follows?a staunch antienvironmentalist. And he became visibly annoyed, after asking the class why we should spend millions on space exploration, if anyone dared answer, "So we know where we can go if the Earth ever becomes uninhabitable."

"The Earth is not going to become uninhabitable," he'd sneer back. "It's not going to 'blow up,' either. That's just garbage."

Still, I liked the man. Didn't agree with him much, but he wasn't stupid, and he could usually take a joke. (I remember he gave a test about volcanoes once. One of the questions asked us to name something that forces magma to the Earth's surface. He almost gave me credit for writing "dysentery" instead of, say, "convection currents.")

So when, despite his attitude toward NASA and the environment, he announced that he was starting an after-school astronomy club, I signed up immediately. This was shortly before that goofy Carl Sagan series started running on the PBS, but already I'd decided that I wanted to be an astronomer. This astronomy-club thing came along at a very opportune moment.

I should probably explain that this was in Wisconsin during the fall and winter of 1979. That time of year, that part of the country, it gets pretty dark by 3:30, making something like an "after-school astronomy club" actually viable.

The first meeting was a simple one. The six or seven geeks who'd signed up met in his classroom, then went up to the roof, where he'd set up a small reflecting telescope. I don't know if it was his or the school's, but I doubt very much our school would've had something like that in storage. That first night he was just going to point out a few basic things in the night sky?Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, whatever was visible at the time?let us practice finding them ourselves and that was that. It would be very simple.

Only problem was, when it came my turn to peer through the eyepiece, not only could I not see Jupiter?I couldn't even find the eyepiece, or the telescope for that matter. Even after someone led me over to the telescope and I was able to feel my way down to the eyepiece, it was hopeless. It was even too late to try to fake anything. I shook my head and backed away.

"You didn't see anything?" Mr. Walker asked.

"Nope," I said.

"Well try again, then. Come on. Anybody can see these things."

"Not me," I said.

"Well maybe you should start carrying a white cane around, then," he said. I could hear the chuckle barely hidden underneath the words.

I chuckled back, if weakly, taking it all as a joke, despite how frustrated I was with the situation. I knew he only meant it to be a lighthearted jibe.

At that age (I was 14 at the time), I still had no idea that anything was wrong, eye-wise, except for a nasty dose of nearsightedness. I was still convinced that, day or night, I saw the world as sharply as everyone else did so long as I wore my glasses. The fact that other people were able to function in darkness, read menus in dim restaurants and see fucking Jupiter through a rinky-dink reflecting telescope only convinced me that they all had a trick up their sleeves?a trick those bastards weren't sharing with me.

As Mr. Walker tracked down Mars, I quietly wandered back into the school, downstairs and home. What was the point? I didn't even like the rest of the kids who were there.

Despite what that experience should have taught me (both things it should have taught me, actually), I remained intent on becoming an astronomer. I was so adamant, in fact, that my parents even bought me a telescope for Christmas the following year.

I was thrilled to have one?but only thrilled because I had obviously already blocked the memory of that disastrous night with Mr. Walker's astronomy club. Once I got my new telescope out in the backyard and began peering around the skies on my own, I realized it was hopeless. The moon I could see, but who gives a shit about the moon? My eyes seemed to tell me that there was nothing else up there.

Instead, I moved the telescope upstairs to my bedroom and set it up in front of the window, where I used it to spy on the neighbors.