Playing Fair and Being Kind

My favorite target in the middle of night is Polaris. I shoot my line of sight upward and toward the North. I only know the direction from familiar objects; my house setting, the road layout, the gaps in the trees blocking the horizon. From these clues I swing my binocular vision and lock onto that point of light between the lazy double u and the big dipper. There it is. I’ve got it in my sights. The speed with which I grasp its beauty is faster than the rays arriving onto the surface of my eyeballs.
The light from Polaris is not arriving as much as it is on the surface of the Eye.
Polaris is three stars. I see Polaris out my bedroom window.
The speed of light vs the speed of sight. Which is it?
What of the speed of appreciation and nostalgia? The speed of the pain of beauty filling the heart?
I believe the starlight from Polaris has always been on the surface of the orb. The night I went out on deck to observe Orion in 1958; it was in the Tidewater region of Virginia. I was a young man in the Navy. My first ship. A large vessel about six hundred feet in length named for the constellation Orion. A crew of over a thousand young men on board. On the athwartship passageway near the quarterdeck was a display attached to the bulkhead. A beautiful, nautical themed clutch of plaques and other salty mementos to memorize for life. One was the layout of the stars which make up Orion. The belt and sheath along with the knees, raised hands and the dangerous bull ready to charge and gore. Heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old far away from home in a tropical clime. The smells of diesel fuel and deck paint always in the nose. Bells and bosun’s pipes sounding nearly constantly. Announcements of when to start your broom to give her a clean sweep down. The time of day was not the only thing given from that speaker system; it was the comings and goings of the senior officers; “Subron Six, arriving!” “Orion, departing!” as well as when to start your brooms, when and where to assemble all trash and garbage on the pier.
What a great place to be! It was quite poetic to me. Imagine the pace of life with the repair vessels and all the submarines and destroyers in that hunter-killer fleet. Many were at sea at any time. The ones sitting along side the piers were being readied to go back to sea. Sailors, most dressed in chambray shirts and dungaree pants with white dixie-cup hats, all carrying odd-shaped pieces of equipment or bits of machinery to and from places of great interest and intrigue. Very few people were stationary. Everyone was in motion and moving with purpose. Except me of course. I was standing in a foreign place with no idea which way was the way I should be going. Steel decks, steel bulkheads, steel water-tight doors, steel hatches, steel portholes. Everything was beyond my ken. And all the time Polaris was sitting above me, in the North.
Here I am, over sixty years later, contemplating those years of my youth when I was shaped like a spring steel wire. Here I am lying in my bed and looking out the window toward the North Star and watching movies of my life pass in the dark of my bedroom and my mind.
Gentle George
October 27, 2019