The Last Word On Nothing

Recently Ann wrote that, in the pandemic, she’d been paying attention to “the world that exists when I’m not noticing it, the world that goes on about its own business.”

The other day, the world did something fantastic. It passed through the dust from an asteroid, giving us the Geminids. This is apparently one of the better meteor showers, but I’d never paid attention to it before. Who goes and stares at the sky outside when it’s cold? Not me.

But this weekend I heard the Geminids were coming, and it was going to be clear, and this year I’ve decided I have to put up with cold if I ever want to see my friends in person, so I suggested to a friend that we go chase them. She has a warm coat, so she agreed, and my parents agreed too, so all of us sat in the cold in a field behind a middle school in the suburbs, waiting for pieces of dust to burn.

It wasn’t a spectacular light show. In two hours, we might have seen 15 or 20. But “OOOH!” you’d say, breaking off mid-sentence, when a good one went by. Then telling the others what part of the sky it was in.

Most years at this time, I’m so busy. Holiday parties. Running from one thing to the next. Leaving work after dark, finding dinner, going to a theater to watch a performance or to perform myself.

And every year, while I do that, the Earth is busting through this cloud of dust and the fiery trails are flying across the sky, whether I watch them or not.

My friend pointed out Betelgeuse, an orange star in the shoulder of Orion, and I realized I’d picked it out before – it was in the news in January of 2020, for getting fainter. (It’ll explode someday, although probably not soon.)

In that moment I realized: It’s almost January again. I could see the passage of time, there in the sky. I’m looking out at Orion again, and here we all are, looking back at almost the whole of 2020, hitting this cloud of dust again, nearly another full circuit around the sun.

Photo: Asim Patel