Taken Somehow By Surprise

So Much Gone and Going

13 A young star, T Tauri Component Sb, has been gravitationally ejected from a star group in the constellation Taurus, 450 light-years from Earth. It could slow down over many years and remain within the gravitational grasp of its star family, making a wide loop and eventually heading back home. Or it may have found enough escape velocity to leave for good. —AP wire story i. But from this distance, to my untrained naked eye, nothing seems that astronomically out of whack. I can’t see any celestial cause for alarm. Just ask Eddie Ponicsan, my third-grade classmate who ran away from home, who survived almost two weeks in an alley behind the White Rose Diner, barely a dozen blocks from his own front door, before finally giving in and giving up for good his fugitive ways. A scary few years later it was Jimmy Horvath running into the bad dream of his life— grabbing a bat, chasing an armed intruder into the autumn moonlight and never coming back. And I’d wake up soon enough to Debbie Fuller, suddenly moving with her family—a totally unheard-of quantum leap to Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Some nights I can almost make her out in the dimming constellations of a childhood light-years away: Old Man Cooper’s Five & Dime. Her mother’s ancient robin’s-eggblue station wagon. The red-dirt playground haze of Hamilton School. So Much Gone and Going 14 But thanks to science, I have to admit it’s more likely the light from wherever Debbie Fuller used to be—radiant, shimmering, atmospheric—coming back the long way home to me. ii. There’s a lot of leaving in the world—let alone in the unsettled vastness of the universe. Greyhound busses. Wives and boyfriends. Sailors running wild on shore. Hotel guests and partygoers. Entire rain-forest species we’ve never heard of, checking out by the hundreds. Refugees from war and love, hands full of anything left to hold onto, on the move for days or years, getting away with their lives. Even more or less at home, where the roof still hasn’t fallen in completely, we might finally leave well enough alone, no matter how imperfect. Leave it be. If there’s going to be trouble in the living room again, we could leave it, just this once, for someone else. Leave us out of it, please. And if we end up leaving a light on before disappearing into a night that will only get longer, it’s more a way of saying we forgot to turn it out than anything it could possibly say about making our 40-watt stand against the dark. As if there’s really somewhere else we have to be. As if we’ll somehow know it when we get there. And when we tell ourselves and anyone else who’s listening, looking on from an admittedly unbelievable distance, that we won’t be back, ever, or that we most certainly will— depending on which no or yes this time is the tiny lozenge of bravado worn down but incredibly intact on the tip of the tongue— chances are, either way, it’s a promise light-years beyond our ability to keep it. As empty as interstellar space. 15 With so much gone and going, we’re sure to be, sooner or later, what’s left: the stars of our own small lives. We’ve slowed down through the years, inexplicably drawn again to the gravity of so many situations we actually believed ourselves beyond for good, to the lights we left still burning there. It’s amazing there’s not a lot more burning-out in the world— let alone in the dogged, star-studded firmament. iii. Because this is America, there’s really StarBright, Inc.— after paying their Galactic Finder’s Fee of $99.95, you’re entitled to name, as you wish, one previously undesignated star. Considering the magnitude of the gesture, it’s usually a misguided, romantic, or last-minute gift, a little something bound to outshine those clunky astronomers’ darlings like Regulus or Betelgeuse or Rigel. StarBright’s got an infinite supply of brilliant orphans waiting for your call. They’ll enter the name in some Giant Star Registry, and of course there’s a certificate suitable for framing, plus a guide to finding it from anywhere, anytime, in any season...