How the Stars Move Above the Mist

It was the night of the comet. The best viewing night of all, and after busy weeks stacked on each other like a pancake supper, we loaded the telescope, carefully set in the molded safety of its case, into the back seat of the car. A warmed-up supper of Campbell’s bean and bacon soup and melted cheese on tortillas sat in our stomachs like an anchor holding a boat in a storm.

There is something about anticipation that slows time. A half-mile from the city we held to the speed limit. Within a few minutes of passing the last convenience market, we sped up a little, just above the speed limit. By the time the lights of the city hid themselves in small valleys and behind tree farms and fields where pumpkins gave birth to themselves, we were a full ten miles over the limit. The trees and the pumpkins couldn’t care less.

We dropped over a hill into a bottle of smoky ink, fog throwing our headlights back in our faces. One faint light to the west, two to the east, and a reddish glow behind as Sodom must have looked after a long day’s walk. A faint luminescent sign pointed the way to the model airplane field.

Empty. Did I neglect to mention that with every mile we drove, the fog became thicker? It was like falling into an old box of insect specimens where exoskeletons were pinned to the very same cotton we now drove through. Slowing with each curve, signs wreathed like romance, we made our way to the field of grounded toy planes.

We set the telescope up anyway, pulling each smooth black piece from its molded bed as if the very act of bringing into the open such a precise instrument could turn the weather around.

The comet should be near the horizon now, in the northeast sky. Like the fallen tree in the forest, we could not know if it made sound or light.

We ranged the sky with the lens, caught a fleeting glimpse of the North Star, and then moisture covered everything. It was raining without gravity—droplets forming underneath the tube as quickly as atop it. Like the angels, we lived in the clouds and did not fall through.

It had been a long day for both of us. The necessities of life in middle age, the unaccustomed body slowness, the speed of the days passing, the need to work when the joy of it was long gone. The anticipation of an evening just for the two of us, our minds on the heavens, the warmth of the eyepiece like a seat recently vacated. No way were we going to give up.

When the skies yielded nothing worth watching, like naughty children we pushed the lens into a more horizontal view, and we did not give one thought to passing that large, lighted window.

Framed there, like some gothic nursing home scene, were two bent figures leaning on silver aluminum walkers, facing each other. These old ones slowly pushed their walkers into the middle of our framed view until they met, with an almost audible click. The fog pulled a curtain over our view, as if what was about to occur demanded the respect of privacy. We fiddled with the scope, adjusting the focus, unable to pull away from this shameful act of peeping. Peeping at these ancient people, as if at our futures.

The sharp yellow light returned to view, and now the old couple was facing us, as if they knew we were watching, as if they had some act of wisdom to perform for us--an heirloom of shuffling movement granted to an unlikely pair with a dripping telescope and no comet to pursue.

The old couple took a couple of awkward shuffling steps, leaving their walkers just behind. They moved at the star’s own pace, as they inch across the night sky. One step, two, a scarf of fog, the walkers obscured by bodies turning, hands reaching and meeting, melding into one shapeless form. And then, face to face, cheek to cheek, belly to belly, with infinite care, and with the slow grace of snails moving through a garden, they began to dance.