The edge of hope

Sundials and Sydney

Sidra wanted to make sundials so we did. It took a little longer and a little more effort than that, of course.

This was science club. Nine first graders after school, perhaps learning something, almost as if by chance, about how things work. I was trying somehow to explain what I could barely grasp myself from years of looking at the sun and spinning along with the earth.

I held up a globe and told the kids that if the earth was that big, the sun would be a ball of fire about the size of Central Middle School – and that it would have been burning for billions of years or so more than two miles away near the turnpike. And because of the tilt of the earth, we get seasons. The gnomon on the sundial – that’s the thing that makes the shadow when the sun’s rays shine on it to tell time – the edge of the gnomon has to point along the axis of the earth to the pole star. On a sundial, the moving shadow of sun time should match our clock time.

The kids were going to have to trust me that the pole star, barely visible in our light-polluted nighttime skies, was indeed 39 degrees up that way somewhere up in the bright blue afternoon sky. Latitude and longitude made little more sense to them than north and south. Thank goodness the streets here run north and south and east and west, or I’d likely be lost, too. Oh my stars, there was some stumbling among the kids over whether the sun comes up in the east or in the west. And then some  confusion over the concept that it’s our planet that does the turning and that if it suddenly stopped, we’d all go flying off into space at a thousand miles an hour.

They were paying attention, but who knows what a first grader can get? The universe still boggles my older brain. A new moon every twenty eight days is about all I can handle at times. I can Google that the sun is really 93 million miles away and that the surface burns at a temperature of ten thousand degrees.

But here on earth it takes me thirty minutes to walk to the river.  And there was thin ice on my garden pond Thursday afternoon. Willie, one of the first graders, pushed on the ice and broke through, his hand and arm plunging half-way to his elbow. He said “It’s cold.” That scientific observation makes the kind of sense I can feel. So if I am four times those first grader’s size by volume and ten times their age in trips around the sun, it feels to me like light-years since I was their size and age. But I know that light-years is the wrong measure. Proxima Centauri, the next nearest star to us here on earth after our own star, is four light-years away from us. In miles, I think that’s a gazillion.

In our case in science club, an angled piece of cardstock would be the gnomon. I will admit that the science was mostly over their heads. North was mostly over their heads. Drawing the straight lines from the marks around the perimeter of a disk of cardstock to a point in the center required help for most of the kids. Between two moms and me – that’s three spinning kids for each grown up bouncing back and forth, four glue sticks, a ruler and assorted books for straight edges, and colored markers – we made sundials.

When each sundial was finished the kids ran outside into the late afternoon sun. More help was needed to point the gnomon toward a north star they couldn’t see. And of course, if it had been night, the sundial wouldn’t have worked at all. And yet, one after another, the kids could see that sun time and clock time were the same.

Except time doesn’t feel constant to me the way science explains it.

It was 9:57 by the red numerals by the clock at the head of my bed when I had switched off the light later that night. I woke up at 11:15 when my wife slipped under the covers. When the glowing red numerals approached midnight, I got out of bed. I am used to sometimes having things or people on my mind in the middle of the night. I put on a few more layers of clothing. Then I turned the knob to the back door slowly and quietly opened it and stepped out into the night. The air was still cold, but I felt a slightly warming breeze on my face. The tilt of the earth orbiting around the sun was beginning to do its inexorable thing.

When I looked up, I could see the two stars of the Big Dipper nearly straight overhead pointing down to the pole star. A nearly full moon was still rising over the roof of my house. The backyard was bright. The metal pipe I had pounded into the lawn pointing to the north at the 39 degree angle that corresponds to Lawrence’s latitude was making moon shadow. The sticks I had stuck into the ground to mark the daytime hours cast their own shadows but told no time for me now.

I recalled trying to explain how that all worked to the kids part of a turn of the earth ago.  If where I was now standing would have been the center of the sun, the moon would have been engulfed, the edge of the sun still nearly another actual earth-moon length farther out. I am beginning to get the idea that the universe is mind boggling big. I hadn’t even mentioned to the kids that if they imagined that the entirely solar system was the size of a quarter, the sun would be just a speck at that scale. And if the quarter sized solar system were placed in the middle of Mass St., then Proxima Centauri would be three blocks away on Barker. Give or take. And how many eye blinks to the farthest star in the universe?

The ninety minutes with the kids passed by in an instant. Now, looking up at the apparently motionless stars, the universe seemed to pause indefinitely. But the speed of unimaginably streaking light is the speed of the universe.

What of all this ought a human being to grasp? I don’t have more than half-a-clue how those glowing numerals get on my clock. Sun time makes some small sense to me, but the scale of things out beyond this planet boggles my brain. And how would I have known when to get out of bed before sunrise to get ready for school when I was a kid if we used sundials? And how would the teachers have known when to let us out to go play on a rainy day?

But standing still here in the clear darkness, I could see the dipper pointing downward to the pole star. A diamond so far away above me in the sky.

And yet all of this wasn’t what was keeping me from sleeping. Strangely, it was a kind of comfort for me. This is my home. It was, instead, something even more mysterious that pulled me from my warm bed: the heartbreaking beauty of life.

Twenty one years ago, a girl named Sydney, newly born, came down the driveway just steps away from where I was standing in the universe.  Dawn and I then shared that driveway with her family who lived one house to the north. I watched Sydney grow up. I played with her now and then for the first half of her life until her parents and older sister moved away. I saw Sydney again last fall when Dawn and I visited her mother. I had been following her spring semester study abroad trip to Morocco as she posted photos on Facebook.

Just about four spins of the earth before our science club made sundials, she was hit by truck. She has been kept unconscious while having brain surgery and then a trip by air ambulance to London. She is getting the best care possible and the plan is to start to take her off sedation a few days from now and to then see how she responds. Almost every good possibility still exists for her. Several scary ones loom. Uncertainty and waiting have been the words of the week for everyone who cares about Sydney.

This is one bit of the heartbreaking nature of life for us human beings. If not for the beauty around us, we couldn’t bear it. But we are indeed engulfed in beauty when we are able to see it. Sydney’s life, up until this moment of uncertainty, has been filled with the beauty of a galaxy of stars. Each of those 6 year olds imagining what little that they could comprehend about the sun and the earth and making their colored marks on paper are more beautiful than constellations. The baristas that I care about a little at a coffee shop I stop at along my walks that are Sydney’s age, shine in their own unimaginably beautiful ways. One of those twenty year olds is now on her own study abroad in Scotland. I see her photos on the FB. And there are my neighbors up the street, the mom walking by our house, with their own two little girls, on their way to the park the other afternoon. She has a baby growing inside her. For every cycle of the moon, human women of a certain age create the possibility of a new beautiful life within each of their bodies. I don’t really grasp much of this beauty, either. But again and again it shines around me.

And I, myself, was nothing more than a possibility when the light of some of the stars I can see tonight began to travel across time and space at light speed. And so, all of this and so much more of our singular lives – the coming and going and so much beauty - has spiraled on around us. And in a part of the universe that is the size of a hospital bed, so much care and uncertainty has now been focused on one life. If our hope – mine, Sydney’s family, and many friends, most who I don’t even know at all - is centered on Sydney, how far out into the universe does the edge of our hope extend?

Another night looking up at the night sky has past. And now, an additional week of waiting - with occasional reports – is also in the past as well. Sydney has yet to go safely off of her sedation, but there is progress. Very good medical professionals still anticipate recovery. They are taking this one step at a time, with all the care they can manage.

We live much of our lives in moments and hours. And an arm’s lengths or the distance between my eyes and those first grade kid’s eyes on Thursday are the scale that we measure most often. How to sleep through every night in an unfathomable and heartbreaking universe is beyond me.

I hope to one day look into Sydney’s eyes and tell her that some parts of her life made some of mine more beautiful. Maybe I’ll tell her about making sundials with some kids that reminded me of who she had been just over a blink ago in the neighborhood where I still live. Maybe I’ll just manage to give her a hug.

Hope lives in the vastness of the universe. Beauty shines brightly. Some of the universe is over our heads. Some of it is within each of us.