JANUARY 2, 2021 – “Huh?!” my wife said. On her part this isn’t an unusual response what I utter out of the blue; a non sequitur that leaves her contemplating our future, when she’s living in the “come and go as you please” wing of the nursing home, and I’m confined to the “keep this door locked at all times” floor.
Whatever. I derive a measure of amusement from saying something out of the blue; some distant galaxy of random thoughts. Yesterday, while my wife, our son Byron, and I were discussing a certain challenge for which there are no simple solutions, just intelligent choices, I downshifted topics abruptly.
Facing more in the direction of our son than toward my wife, I said, “Did you know that if the sun were the dot over an ‘i’, the nearest star would be a dot 10 miles away?”
“Really?!” said Byron, who’s learned to humor his dad.
Then came the “Huh?!” from my wife, followed by the inevitable, “What on earth does that have to do with what we’re talking about?”
“Perspective,” I said.
That induced another “Huh?!” and “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Dad said it for perspective,” Byron came to my aid. Within the extended family, he’s known for his diplomacy.
I left it at that and shifted back into high conversational gear along the route our talk had been following. For inquiring minds, however, I feel compelled to complete the “perspective” I’d attempted to introduce into our conversation. Specifically, if, in my example of scale, the closest star is a dot 10 miles from the dot over this “i,” other stars within our galaxy would be microscopic to dime-sized dots hundreds and thousands of miles away. The point, so to speak, is that not only are galactic (and inter-galactic) distances vast, but for the most part the universe is nothing more than . . . nothing.
Now that’s really something . . . when it comes to perspective!
While wrapping your brain around all of this, you might wonder about the source of the above-referenced astronomical factoids. Herein lies the whole moral of the story: never let a learning opportunity go to waste . . . as it were.
What “on earth” do I mean? Therein lies the humor of the story, though my wife might rightly question my sense of it.
For years ending with the initial lockdown imposed because of the pandemic—back when “the numbers” were a small fraction of today’s horrific statistics (weren’t those the good ol’ days!)—I took the bus to and from work. Since we live in an inner-ring suburb, the ride each way was only 20 minutes. This guaranteed 40 minutes of daily reading time.
Nowadays my guaranteed reading time is vastly reduced, thanks in part to a highly efficient lower digestive tract; so efficient, that I’m lucky if a single sentence can be assured. But often, as in the case herein recounted, what a sentence!
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
