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Hot Tub Star Gazing

It must have been more than thirty years now, when I first started thinking about the stars in any significant way.  When I was growing up, outside of Milwaukee, there were those occasionally precious clear nights when I could sit outside with my dad while he smoked his pipe, and listen to him tell stories.  He wasn’t always a very talkative sort, being born in a practical time to Depression-era parents who conserved everything, even speech.  But when he was in the mood, you couldn’t stop him, and I loved hearing him tell stories.  Sometimes he would talk about the stars.

It only occurs to me now, sitting in my own backyard, when I force myself to relax by taking advantage of the hot tub the kind folks at choosehottubsdirect.com helped me select, that the stars today are the same ones from my childhood.  Maybe it seems like an obvious observation, but it seems significant to me somehow.  There are so many things that have changed over the years.  The way my generation thinks about money and objects is very different from how my grandparents thought, and we look at the world differently now.

Maybe we know more now, or maybe we know about some things more than we used to, but I tend to think there’s a lot of forgotten knowledge.  Maybe it does have to do with the simpler pleasures, like enjoying the moment of looking at the stars.  But the older I get, the more I understand that my father’s economy with words was never an indication of his inner life, which  I understand now was very large and complex.  His dreams and aspirations were complicated puzzles, and he knew about the stars.  He knew their names, and he always took the time to teach me their names, and only recently I came across some correspondence about how he and his father used to spend evenings staring at the stars, talking about names of things that were older than anything they could have imagined on their own.

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