An Eye to the Sky
Confessions of an Amateur Astronomer
Houdini Weenie
For this trick, a time machine, a little ore dust, and a smokestack staining the sky with chemicals.
Add a fat boy, locked in his room while a party’s rip-and-roar rattles holy statues on his dresser.
It’s me, gentle reader, sent to bed for shattering McMahon’s picture window, for eating the coconut icing before the first “Happy Birthday” broke wind, for calling Aunt Esther an alien and having the goods to prove it.
Through a crack in the door, I see her husband in cherry-red flip-flops.
He’s polishing his glasses with a tissue, smiling at this here unfortunate peeper.
Earlier that day, I had read a book on Galileo.
I was hooked on telescopes, searching for the magic ring concealed in cereal boxes of skinny boys, of boys with money and pedigreed dogs.
It’s the late 1950s, and through a screened bedroom window, I see a full moon shot full of holes.
And through a screened bedroom window, I tumble, caught an hour later stealing candy from a local drugstore.
“A regular escape artist,” my uncle says, shaking his finger at me.
“A regular little Houdini Weenie.”
When I was sixteen I worked at Pulaski’s Florist in Lackawanna, NY in the greenhouse moving plants around and watering them, sometimes going out on deliveries with the owner’s wife. It was a nice, quiet job, which I would have kept if I hadn’t had to navigate one area of the greenhouse where a beehive was wedged in the corner of a glass ceiling about three feet above various species of cacti. Every time I approached it, I could hear a faint buzzing of bees that, magnified by my fear and anxiety, would eventually become deafening.
“Just ignore them,” Joe Pulaski used say. “They wound up here for a reason.” Joe, a thin guy, with coke bottle glasses and long stringy grey hair tied back into a ponytail, lived in a world where everything had a natural purpose and made sense. If he happened upon a grizzly in the woods, he probably would have casually approached it, bowed, and offered to shake hands.
I actually agreed with Joe about the bees. They were there for a reason, the reason being to scare the crap out of me and turn my head into a pin cushion, which they did one day when I accidentally disturbed the beehive with the top of my broom handle.
According to the doctor at the ER, I was stung in the head at least ten times, so they shot me up with a med that made me as hyper up as a transgendered black Jew who’d just gotten discovered by a hostile crowd at a MAGA rally.
When I got home, I went on a tirade, calling Joe, who was really one of the sweetest guys you’d ever meet, a variety of names I had used in my last history report on Hitler and Mussolini.
My father looked at my wounds. He sighed deeply. I thought he murmured “fuckhead,” but I must have been wrong because what he actually said was, “Joe’s heart’s always in the right place, but sometimes his head is up his ass.”
In my father’s cosmology, most people lived with their heads up their asses. According to him, people never saw the big picture, too worked up over petty day-to-day nonsense like the supermarket running out of Fluff or the paperboy leaving the newspaper on the sidewalk instead of putting it on the porch. Maybe that’s why he bought us a telescope one Christmas. Maybe he thought our minds might expand more if our heads were fixated on the wonders of the universe instead of being jammed up our asses.
Since then, I have always tried to own a telescope, even though I probably have never worked it properly. The more lenses I had, the more confused I became. So what? I say. As far as I’m concerned, if my untrained eye, pushed tightly to the lens, mistakes a passing firefly for a flaming meteor, what’s the harm? What actually occurs in the sky isn’t as important to me as what I “imagine” occurring in the sky. The idea of gazing at celestial bodies is to imagine yourself lost in the empty dark spaces between them, or traversing the rocky terrain of some dead planet, hoping to come upon some pointy-headed creature who has also imagined itself into this same landscape at the exact same moment.
Which brings me to the astronomer Johannes’s Kepler. Most people are unaware of his unusual and almost psychedelic sci-fi novel novel, Somnium, where a demon summons characters to the moon, specifically to an island called Levania, where other demons have the ability to shuttle humans back and forth from the moon to the earth. At one point, the narrator describes his experience as follows: “Our bodies will roll themselves into balls, as spiders do, and we’ll carry them by means of our will alone.”
These are the kinds of imaginary journeys that appeal to me—the ones that make me periodically seek out a way to view the stars more seriously than just staring at the glow-in-the-dark galaxies on my grand-nephew’s ceiling.
This desire brought me last week to the Ladd Observatory in Providence, RI, which is the home of one of the few refractor telescopes in the country. It’s a place attracting a lot of local amateur astronomers, all who, as I listened to them speak to each other, could have been cast as new members of The Lone Gunmen group in an X-File episode.
The Observatory itself sits on one of the highest areas of Providence, which was originally called “Tin Top Hill” because for years people had been dropping tin cans on the ground. At the time, there were very few houses, and so the view of the sky was not impaired by streetlights. The main building is of brick with a masonry pier inside, which supports the main telescope.
The telescope is a refractor with a 12” lens and it has a 15ft focal length. The lens was designed by Professor C. S. Hastings and made by John A. Brashear, one of the great lens makers of the time. What makes this telescope unique is that it is one of the oldest ones that has been continuously used; moreover, there has been no modernization done to it, no motors added. Even the opening and closing of the dome is done by hand.
In contrast, the new telescopes are highly automated—you press a few buttons and they’ll lock onto any object in the sky. As one amateur astrologist, a little plump guy with hair like Albert Einstein’s, explained to me, “The difference between viewing the heavens through those new telescopes and the Ladd is like the difference between going on a cruise ship to experience the life a seaman or traveling to Mystic, Connecticut and walking around old whaling vessels.”
The telescope itself looks like a piece of dismantled tubing from a submarine. It has small clocks attached to it, which keep the telescope in motion, so that as the sky moves the telescope moves with it. In layman’s terms, the telescope counters the movement of the earth—the earth moves one way, the telescope, the other.
Aesthetically, because of its age, you have this wonderful feeling of entering a time warp when you see it functioning and gaze through it. You can witness breathtaking shots of the moon on cloudless nights, and at certain times of the year, Mars, Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and even galaxies are visible.
The night I was there, a guy named Roger manipulated the opening and closing of the dome and focused the telescope on the Great Nebula of Orion, shifting then to Mars and Jupiter, eventually ending up with a view of the moon, where I got an extraordinary glimpse of a pear-shaped crater named Guttenberg and the Sea of Nectar.
Now I realize that most of you can’t drive to Providence to experience the joys of the Ladd Observatory, but check around your local area and I’m sure you’ll find some amateur astronomers’ group who will offer some possibilities. And if you’re too lazy or lack any sense of adventure to do that, then search the web where you can find a number of apps. that will give you live shots of various celestial bodies.
If you do the latter, though, while you’re staring at your phone like a dummy, try to do it while lying on your back on a clear night, so that, at the very least, you might accidentally glance up into the wondrous night sky above you.
Which is way, way better than being at the whims of an electronic device, and choosing, as my dear departed father would say, to have your head up your ass.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories