Seeing southern stars, thanks to my dad.

I had to fetch a couple of things at our local supermarket just now, and the walk through the always-interesting back alley behind our house was all the nicer because of the luxuriously mild it’s-not-even-spring-yet spring weather. There aren’t many things better for the soul than one’s first spring evening walk of the year. On the way there, the neighbourhood boys having a ball riding their bikes through the puddles in the alley reminded me of all the fun we used to have riding our bikes with our friends in Queensborough – particularly flying down the hill by the old Catholic Church and the former school (now the Community Centre), which seemed to us little kids dangerously and excitingly steep but is in reality very tame indeed.

Venus and Jupiter putting on a show, even above the bright lights of Montreal.

On the way back, though, my attention was drawn to the western sky, where Venus and Jupiter continue to put on a spectacular show this month: shining as bright as all get out and very close to one another. This photo from our back deck, telephone cables and all and muddied with ambient city light, doesn’t remotely do it justice, but it’s still kind of cool.

When I’m out of the city where I can actually see the stars, I love looking at the night sky and pondering the unponderable vastness of the universe. I think I like it especially because it was something my dad, Wendell, liked to do too. Unlike me, he was very knowledgeable about the stars and the constellations and the celestial movements of things, and he liked pointing stuff out when you asked him to.

In the late 1980s Dad and I travelled together to Papua New Guinea, of all places. My aunt – his sister – Marion Sedgwick was a missionary there for the United Church of Canada. She wasn’t there proselytizing; she is a trained nurse and teacher of nurses, and she was doing both in a remote village called Salamo on Fergusson Island, off the west east coast of the main island of New Guinea. She had wanted a visit from family while she was there (which was several years) and Dad (who wasn’t much for travelling) felt it was his duty to go. My mother was having none of it; she is asthmatic, and she was terrified of the effect the tropical heat and humidity would have on her. So I went in her stead, and quite the adventure it was. Those stories can wait for another time, except for one, that tells you a little something about the kind of person my dad was.

Early in our stay of a couple of weeks, I had mentioned in passing that it would be cool to see the Southern Cross while we were in the Southern Hemisphere. (I think I was influenced a bit by that great mid-’70s album by The Band called Northern Lights – Southern Cross. You can listen to the gorgeous Acadian Driftwood from that album here.) As you can imagine, the stars put on a good show in Salamo, where electric lights were rare indeed and service was spotty even if you did have it. But it turned out to be the time of year that the Southern Cross wasn’t to be seen at any time of the night that a person was likely to be awake to see it. I wasn’t overly bothered; that seemed to be that.

But in the middle of the night one night toward the end of our stay, I was awakened by Dad. “The Southern Cross,” he told me quietly. We went out onto the little patch of grass in front of the village guest house where we were staying, and looked up. And there it was; a constellation neither of us had ever seen before and that Dad would never see again, bright and strange and beautiful.

The Southern Cross. I found this photo at a great blog called From Offshore (fromoffshore.wordpress.com) by Ted Spurling, Jr., who lives on an island off the coast of Maine – not really all that far (as the crow flies) from Stonington, which I've written about before. Ted is currently working as a translator on a medical mission to Ecuador. Good stuff!

While I had been sleeping obliviously each night, Dad  – who was a very strong man but found the heat and the general foreignness and the brutal distance from home on that trip very trying and tiring – had been quietly getting up at different times in the middle of the night to scan the sky in search of the Southern Cross. So that his daughter could see it.

When I look up at the stars in the night sky in Queensborough, where it is dark at night and they will be bright, I will think of Dad every time. And of all the times he must have looked up at them from the very same place, and – as a clergyman – been awed by the work of the Creator’s hand.