"Focal Point"

This March, however, Carson was able to visit me over his spring recess. Because Comet Hale-Bopp was making its appearance and because at my son’s age I owned my first telescope, I went to Sears to buy a cheap starter telescope. Such purchases are difficult. When you are divorced, separated from your son, you naturally want each moment you share with him to be special, a seed for a memory he will have that will somehow remain through a lifetime. But you also want to avoid the problem of buying a child’s affection by making up for lost time through material offerings and appeasements. That’s why I chose Sears and not the Pocono-Optics Store that advertises “over three hundred Meade and Celestron telescopes in stock,” just four miles from where I live. I didn’t want a telescope with the pretentions of refined optics and near-perfect resolution. I wanted nothing more than a Tasco or Bushnell telescope, and I wanted to buy it from a clerk who didn’t know the difference between a reflector and refractor telescope, who could tell me at most that “kids sure do love their telescopes.”

Of course, I knew what I was really buying: something of my past, something that had to do with my first 100-power Tasco “StarGazer” telescope and with my own star and planet ledger that I kept through my adolescence. I was also buying an opportunity of revealing to my son my own expertise. I was buying something I could give him. With this telescope, I could give him the astronomical facts almost everyone knows: how comets are dirty snowballs, how comets do not streak through the sky like meteors, how everything beyond the sixth magnitude slips from our vision. At least I knew I could give him a clean night-sky at my cabin in northeast Pennsylvania that he could never have at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. I could give him the Milky Way and shooting stars.

My son had no choice the first clear night of his stay with me. We went outside, right at 8:00 p.m., duly looking northwest. I waited for him to point out the comet for me, and he did, and he begun reciting the facts his teacher provided, “Hale-Bopp is twenty-five miles across. Hale-Bopp’s tail is two million miles long. Hale-Bopp is further from us than the sun.” I confirmed each one, then added a few comet facts for his litany.

He stood patient the minutes it took me to align the telescope, to get the comet perfectly centered, and he didn’t seem to mind much when I told him to be careful and steady when looking through a telescope. I knew my plans were working when he said, “Cool, Dad. Coo-ool,” as he studied the comet’s fuzzy image.

And later, I found the Orion Nebula for him, just so that I could direct him to something subtle and inconspicuous and marvelous. I wanted to show him a part of the heavens that I knew he could own someday and show-off to his friends or to his own child. While he was looking at the nebula, I professed all I knew about the connections between a nebula and a comet, throwing in my own improvised ideas on cosmic dust, solar winds, hydrogen gas, and light. I knew even at that time that I was completely missing the point, as I was trying too hard to come up with material that was beyond the scope of any elementary school teacher, trying to come up with anything that had the promise of endurance to it. Such are the distortions distance causes.

I went on with my lecture until he took control of the telescope, aiming it at the gaudy luminance of the third-quartered moon. A little disappointed over his being attracted to such an ostentatious celestial show, I was at least happy that he was revealing his own interest in the sky. I touched his hand to the focus knob, saying, “This is where you focus.”

“I know, Dad.”

And I knew what that meant, for what boy hasn’t said those words to his father and continues to say those words through adulthood? What boy hasn’t felt exasperation over a father’s insistence to father? And what can a father do then but get out of the way, retreat, and go inside the cabin to give the boy his own chance at discovering sights no one else sees? I must admit that I left him there, feeling sorry for my sorry self.

What happened next is, of course, what happens with children and their magical talents of recovery and delight. And what happened next reminded me of the real power of telescopes. Carson burst through the door, minutes later, excited, urgent, pulling my arm with his entire weight, saying, “Come out, Dad! You gotta see what I found!” And I did, and I do.