The Last Word On Nothing

Cameron said the other day that she’s feeling a little bit low on perspective right now.

First of all: Me, too, Cameron. Me, too.

Secondly: For perspective, I recommend the sky. It’s always there, there’s often something happening in it, and the thing that is happening almost never relates to an election.

Here are some things I have seen in the sky in the last week.

• Mars. It’s bright enough these days for me to find it without my glasses in city light pollution. Is that an official measure of brightness? It should be.
• Vultures. Dozens of them, circling overhead. Also, I was in the backyard of a friend who is a serious birder and could teach me (masked, from a distance) how to tell the difference between black and turkey vultures when they’re far overhead. It has to do with where on the underside of their wings they have lighter-colored patches.
• Two bald eagles. The same friend picked out the birds that weren’t vultures and also figured out what they were. Bald eagles look very different from vultures, even when they’re hundreds of feet up, silhouetted against the sky, but you have to take the time to look.
• The absence of a helicopter. I keep hearing helicopters over my apartment and then, despite having windows on two sides of the building, not being able to find the actual helicopter in the sky. I assume the helicopters exist, and that they aren’t some kind of imaginary brain helicopter I’m inventing.
• Cassiopeia. A high school teacher made us learn the circumpolar constellations and I’ve never stopped noticing that W in the sky.
• A bunch of crows chasing a raven. This looked like a bunch of crow-shaped silhouettes, but one of them was huge and croaky, and the other crow-shaped silhouettes clearly hated it. (Ravens don’t often come to D.C. – this was about 100 miles from here, in West Virginia.)
• A shooting star. Zip! Across a little stretch of sky, just to the left of Mars. I watched for a while, but it was the only one.

When you look back at Earth, everything is still more or less the same, but now you can remember that there’s a bird soaring, or dust burning up in the atmosphere, or that stars still exist.

Photo: Helen Fields