Last night I put my Kindle aside for just long enough to take my dog for a walk. Outside in the post-thunderstorm, South Florida, early evening air, I did something that I have not done in a long time – I looked up at the night sky. At one time, I had an interest in astronomy, and had even purchased a cheap telescope from Home Shopping Network (now that’s commitment). It was an inexpensive instrument, however, and it soon proved to be too poorly constructed to provide a stable viewing platform. Once you finally located an object, viewing it was difficult as the object would shake and flutter and dart from view. No matter how tightly I twisted the mounting screws, or how well I secured the tripod, viewing any celestial body beyond the moon was nearly impossible.

Equipment frustrations aside, I still persisted in my new hobby, subscribing to Astronomy magazine for the monthly star charts, and tightening and tweaking my telescope. In time, other pursuits, plus the fact I was living in a location with a very high level of ambient light, caused my interest in astronomy to wane. But still there were flickers of interest. While visiting Colorado last year, I looked up into the night sky over Central City and remarked to my wife that that was how the heavens were supposed to look. For a short while, I toyed with bring my old telescope down from the attic, or more likely, purchasing a better model. It never happened.

My home in South Florida is directly in the heart of the West Palm Beach / Miami metro-plex. There is so much light in the night sky that on many nights I could read a book in my front yard. These are not conditions for viewing the Horsehead Nebula, or any other celestial body for that matter.

Last night, however, I happened to look west, out over the Everglades. A break in the late evening thunderheads revealed a beautiful picture postcard quality, quarter moon, hanging at about 30 degrees above the horizon. To the left and right above the moon were two brightly shining heavenly objects. Below and to the right was a third object, easily distinguishable, but not quite as brightly shining as the other two.

After completing my dog walk, I did a quick internet search. It took only seconds to find that the bright object, above and to the right of the quarter moon was Saturn, and the object above and to the left was the planet Mars. The body to the right and below the moon, shining with much less intensity than Saturn and Mars, but still easily discernable, was the star Spica, the brightest star in the Constellation Virgo and the fifteenth brightest star that you can view from earth. Located 260 light years from earth, the light that reached my retinas started its journey from Spica in 1752. How do you like that? With a bit more research, I discovered that the last planetary occultation (the last time a planet in our solar system passed directly in front of Spica and obscured the star (occults) it from view, was when the planet Venus passed in front of Spica. That was on November 10, 1783. Not to worry, another planetary occultation is coming up – on September 2, 2197.

Feeling small and insignificant in an unimaginably large universe, I went away from my stellar research with a mental note to look for a new telescope.

Suppose it’s late in the year, 2012. You’re driving to work on I-80 in northern New Jersey, or the DC beltway, or God forbid, 595 in Ft. Lauderdale. You’ve just taken your first sip of coffee and cranked up a Doobie Brothers tune on the local Yacht-rock  FM affiliate when all hell busts loose.

An Atlanta-based shock jock is suddenly telling you that the six-mile-wide meteor that was supposed to be an internet myth has plunged into the Atlantic somewhere south of the Canary Islands. As of this moment, a 250-foot wall of water is racing across the ocean directly toward you. You have a half an hour to get your affairs in order before you take the deep dive, so take a breath. What do you do? Do you call family, friends, or loved ones (you probably won’t get through, so don’t bother). Pray? Who to, they’re probably some Mayan gods anyway, and it’s probably too late to make simpatico with those guys. So since you’re stuck in traffic you may as well flip through your DayTimer (or more likely your iPad or laptop) to see what life-events you’re going to have to scratch for eternity.

If you’re like me, you’ll turn first to the list of books that you’ve always intended to read but put off because you thought you’d have lots of time someday to read them. Well, it’s to friggin’ late now Partner. Here’s my list – let’s just do the top five since there probably is no time for the any more than that:

1. Moby Dick; Herman Melville. I confess I have never read this classic, and I always felt guilty that I didn’t. It was almost the first download that I put on my Kindle, but I opted for Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang instead. Not that I shy from a heavy read. I made it through ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Barnaby Rudge’ but I have never even cracked the cover of this book. Oh well…too late now.
2. Death in the Afternoon; Ernest Hemingway. Being a huge Papa fan, it grieves me that I will be taking my last and final dive without having read this bullfighting classic. Maybe being an animal lover has kept me from reading this one. In any case it has been on my shelf for years – unread, and in light of today’s events likely to remain that way for eternity.
3. The Road; Cormac McCarthy. I am almost as big a fan of Cormac McCarthy as I am of Papa, but it looks like I’ve run out of time on this one too. Being too busy with the Border Trilogy to read it, I will have to bid farewell to, arguably America’s greatest living author, without reading what is considered by many to be his greatest work…oh well.
4. “Infinate Jest”by David Foster Wallace. I have always wanted to read this book every since I picked it up at Barnes and Nobel in University Plaza in Boca Raton a couple of years ago and tried to lift it. I confess, I have never read a word of DFW apart from several bios after his death. But this book keeps coming up and if I were to live well into my nineties, I would probably have read it…but not now.
5. “The Honey Badger” by Robert Ruark. When I was eighteen years old, I bought a paperback in an Iowa drug store titled: Uhuru. It was a great book and over the years I read more about Robert Ruark, a man who emulated Hemmingway, and was a great writer in his own right. So I read Ruark before Papa – how do you like that. This book was  his last and it has been on my list for years.

These are the five books that I will likely to NOT have read when the big one comes down this December.

What are yours??

EP