I remember, among other things, a large globe in the school library that had the stars and the Milky Way marked on it, with a band for the equator… and so forth. No one knew anything about it. It was just the stars and things. It was dusted periodically, but unused. It was not part of the curriculum.

I wondered if we were meant to see the stars, if we stepped back from the globe, as they appeared in the sky, and if that wouldn’t present an optical problem, or if we were expected to imagine ourselves inside the globe looking out. A different problem. I passed the globe several times each day, but didn’t spend much time working out the answer, and to this day have no idea what the answer is or was, though I suspect it was the latter.

I didn’t know enough about the stars and constellations then, and still feel inadequate in that area, though I know much more now than I did then. I’ve been reading the Bible recently (for the past few years), not consistently, but off and on with consistency, to dig out references and stories based on stars and planets. There’s a surprisingly large amount of that in the New Testament. But when I tried to share some of what I’d found with the people I have coffee with, or the people at the Monday dinner, not only did they say absurd things like, “God wouldn’t write that,” but when pressed, they were not actually aware of the existence of constellations or the motions of the planets. Explaining Venus was utterly futile. I thought they were just being argumentative or stupid, as I’m inclined to say, until I realized that Morro Bay is shrouded in clouds a good deal of the year.

Orion comes and goes and is hardly noticed. Even Polaris and the Big Dipper are foreign concepts to the people who have lived here long enough. Astronomy wasn’t part of their high school curriculum, nor was it part of mine, but even those who grew up in places that had stars at night had just that — stars at night. If noticed, they were soon forgotten. Every so often I’ll meet someone who took a trip to the desert, or passed through the desert on the way here, and saw the Milky Way. It was something they found really neat, or really amazing, but otherwise meaningless.

So explaining that Jesus lectured on the edge of the Milky Way is something that I keep to myself. First, it goes against religion or God, or something of that sort, and second, even if I drew a picture, which I’ve tried, no one here would understand. So when I said above that no one knew anything about the globe with the stars on it in my high school library, I think today I might just say no one cared. I tell myself, the end will come when everything ceases to exist.