I'll start by saying that America's health care and insurance system is a national embarrassment and a scam. I've spent hours trying to buy our own insurance that won't bankrupt us before we need to use it. And needing it? that's another tragedy. You have to pay even more to use the thing you've been paying for. It's a mess. A gastrointestinal bleed of collective pain riding us into an early grave. And I say this because I was stressed. I was trying to find a plan that included our kids' dentist and apparently he pissed someone off in wealthy insurance circles because he's nowhere to be found. Hours of my life. gone. Looking for his name among a pile of bureaucratic bullshit. Actual turds of endless disappointment with every click of my carpal tunnel.
see that little light in the sky? we could not.
So that's where I am mentally when my oldest son gets home and announces that we're going to spend another evening finding Jupiter. It's the closest it will be in 107 years and he gets it. He gets time and the passing of years and lives and I want to be there to high five the moment into our collective memory. Our ongoing attempt to stamp a something into place longer than the nano it takes to whiz away into space. And here we have it. The frontier. The boldly going. And Jupiter reaching out to greet us from 43 light minutes. I know this because of the wound tight emotional research I conducted trying to figure out how to properly use our telescope. Jupiter, it turns out, isn't all that far away, so we should be able to see it with our middle-of-the-road looking glass. I went higher quality because that's what a frugal childhood does. We were handed down a telescope that was pretty much a lie. I could look through a paper towel tube and see more. We were so excited to get it. The original box shrieked with the joy of model children, mouths agape, as they shared the high of looking through a tiny hole. We bickered and assembled and rushed with the nervous excitement of all the anticipation of a hundred Christmases before seeing the moon as we'd always seen the moon. Eventually the device would be forgotten. Perched on its tripod and staring at the sky all by itself. Wishing upon a star it could barely see. Before being blown off the deck and broken irreparably.
So tonight would be different? I'd made the upgrade. Even purchased multiple lenses. The problem I have is that experience had made me believe that they don't work. And if I don't think something works, then it’s game over for the likely completely operable thing. I give up. it's dead to me.
My son, however, would not stop. He instructed me to call the shop where I’d bought it. I did and left a lengthy message. And all day I dreamed of the nerdy voice of comfort telling me of the very obvious thing I was overlooking. And it did. Kind of. At first, upon contact, the very nerdy voice delivered a speech about how I shouldn't be worried about my eyes. Yes. But it's a nerdy voice so I listened. You see we were having this issue of trying to see distant planets but instead seeing--I kid you not--something like microbes. It turns out, it was the surface of our eye. We were seeing the floaties and such reflected back to us in unsettling circle of wormy things. The nerdy voice took two breathless minutes to console me about my eye health and that it's something that happens with age. I'm not sure if you've ever let a nerdy voice run free, but it's hard to stop.
Already boiling with the anticipated disappointment of my childhood scope, I hurled little noises at his wall of sound. "Bu--" "Yeah, bu--" "That's not--" all of them falling to my feet. Rusty lawn darts of failed interruption until finally he needed to breathe. And I told him that really wasn't the issue. At least not my optical health. I just wanted to know how not to see my eye and, instead, peruse Jupiter. "Oh," he began like that's all I needed to tell the astronomy expert I'd called. "You're ok with your eyes?" Well, no. Not so much now, but if he could just give me some guidance to assist these dimming sockets in finding a ball 370 million miles away, that would be great.
And he did. But not the easy way. The nerd way. I thought it would be a Fonz bump to the vending machine. You know, the jock way. But it was Newtonian Collimation. Oh fuck. What? The adjusting of all your mirrors so that tiny fragments of the ever-expanding vastness of all that has ever been might show up in an aluminum pipe in your backyard.
I told Quin I'd get the telescope on the roof and wipe down all it's lenses (nerdy advice that I understood) but he had to look up Newtonian Collimation. It was a long shot but he loves science. Apparently, however, he loves TikTok more, and his search had only been about telescopes on a short-form video channel that wormholed him to a trove of apparently far wealthier children looking through focal pieces the size of a whale. Digital whirring purred their view from one coordinate to the next and I was too hungry to push him into the original internet, before it was all rich kids with ad money and product placement. And there it was: a forty-seven minute video from 2009 I'm pretty sure featuring the grown up versions of the two smiling kids on the telescope box of my childhood letdown. But they returned in a big way. Slowly and methodically with bad edits and even worse sound, they walked me through an ancient internet way of explaining things: for the love of doing what they loved. Nerdy voices pouring on the informational sexy.
I skimmed the last twenty to be honest, but goddamn if a Phillips screwdriver didn't at least make me feel like I was doing something. Quin eventually joined me on the roof and asked if I was supposed to drink a beer that fast. I warned him of the danger before crushing it and tossing it on the lawn. I'd need another, as a reward perhaps, if I could just get a glimpse of the goddamn gas giant. Which, if it's a gas giant, can't we just stare at any gap in our sky and proclaim it's an even bigger bit of gas?
This is what victory looks like.
There's this thing I'm not mentioning that may play a role in our struggles. I dropped the telescope from about 7 feet. The last time I was taking it to the roof I'd loosened the wrong bolts and the entire tunnel popped off and crashed to the ground. The mirrors seemed to be intact (how many years of bad luck is a magnified mirror?) but the tube had dents. And it broke off the laser finder part. This is the integral piece that helps you find things, but I couldn't figure it out so cast it asunder as useless. With some Gorilla Glue and some therapy breathing, Quin and I got it back in place. My son then put in place something far more important yet interstellar distant to me: faith in the device. He used the laser thing to line up our flickering neighbor and actually landed on the biggest planet in our solar system. We even saw the moons. We could not believe it. I wouldn't need a victory beer. We drank from the overwhelming odds of our failure. A delicacy now fermented into absolute shock. We could even see moons. Did I already say that? I heard all the nerdy voices in our nerdy past whisper approval at our dedication. My son jumped around and I did that parent PSA about roof death. But we nailed it. Ha. Light years ago we thought we didn't have a chance.