The Comet

A Tale of 1970

He was six.

It was dark. It was very early in the morning.

It was before the sun came up.

The door to his room opened, and the light from the hall came in.

He woke up.

His father was there. Usually his mother woke him up.

His father said, “Come and see the comet.”

He got out of bed.

They went down the stairs. His father opened the front door.

He was wearing pajamas, and he was barefoot.

His father picked him up. His father was strong and big.

It was cold outside. His father was warm. He hugged up against his father.

His father carried him out onto the front porch.

The front porch was a grey-painted concrete slab, only one step up from the front walk. It’s still there. The metal railings on each side, painted black, are still there, too.

There was a rhododendron to the right of the front porch. It’s gone now. There was a bush with red berries, on the left. That’s gone, too.

The large oak tree, with three trunks, on the lawn, to the right, was there.

The oak tree was part of the world. He didn’t know it could go away.

This was before they put the bright streetlights on the telephone poles.

You could still see the stars, in those days.

His father had a telescope. It had a tripod. His father would hold him up so he could look through it. He saw the rings of Saturn. He saw the craters on the Moon.

His father had a book that showed the constellations. The stars had hazy outlines of the Bear and the Centaur and the rest of them. Those names and pictures came from stories the Ancient Greeks made up thousands of years ago.

He knew Orion’s belt. He knew the Big Dipper, and how to find the North Star.

His father pointed to the sky.

“Look.”

The sky was turning pink and white behind the trees in front of him.

But up higher, it was still black, and clear, and there were stars.

And there was a comet.

He saw it. It was in the sky. It was white. It had a tail

His father said the comet was made of ice. As it fell out of space toward the sun, the heat from the sun made some of the ice melt. The melted ice was the tail of the comet.

The comet went around the sun, like the Earth.

One year was how long it took the Earth to go around the sun.

But the comet went far, far out into space.

The comet took thousands of years to go around the sun.

His father said this was their only chance to ever see the comet.

When the comet came back again, in thousands of years, they would both be gone.

He felt sad thinking about his father being gone, or him being gone.

He hugged his father tighter.

His father brought him back upstairs and put him back into bed.