Moonlight Playing Upon the Lamp on My Nightstand & When I Could Not See the Milky Way

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Upon my nightstand rests a lamp which at first glance the base might resemble a crystal cut vase – which it certainly isn’t – but rather it may be a Target or Walmart molded glass base with a cheap thin metal “golden” colored base ring on the bottom. Not sure now how we acquired it or when, but it is useful and now just part of our natural decor.

It is basically a lamp you would not notice if you walked into our bedroom, except for the lamp shade beginning to tatter. But on certain nights during the year, it becomes a wondrous device of beauty.

I do not consciously follow the phases of the moon, other than realizing by the brightening moonlight outside that the moon is moving towards full, or by becoming slowly aware by the increasing darkness of the night that the moonlight is waning into nothing. But on certain nights, the moon rises in the southeast sky, and as it ascends, moonlight begins to filter into the room through the leaves of the tall slender bushes that shelter the back wall of the house from the blazing summer heat of the south sun.

Then, as the moonlight begins to shine into our bedroom, especially if there is a slight breeze breathing the leaves into a slow gentle dance, the moonlight begins to play among the facets of the glass lamp, creating a captured night sky of living starlights within the vase of the lamp. This display I first became aware of when I turned over in bed one night and beheld the moonlight reflected into multiple points of starlight six inches from my eyes, a sight, producing joy and wonder and awe within me.

My enthrallment with its beauty then slowly changed into deeper thought as the memory slowly returned to me of the time in my early youth when I first realized I could not see the Milky Way or its many stars.

One summer, when I was about ten, we as a family – my parents, my five sisters, and me – were camping in Sequoia.  And one evening we were all walking back to our campsite after enjoying the evening’s Ranger-led community campfire and slideshow of the sights of Sequoia and the animals of the park. 

When we camped at Sequoia, I enjoyed the campfires and always looked forward to them.  For to me, looking back on them, they were like our family time in the evening in front of our small black and white TV – familiar and homey, but with more people and in color and something you had to walk to in the evening after supper.

And walking back, I was near my father with a flashlight in my hand to help see where we were walking.  Then suddenly my father stopped and pointed to the sky and said, “Look, Chris, there’s the Milky Way!  Look at all the stars!”  And I stopped beside him and looked up into the sky, and I did not see anything distinct, I did not see lots of stars.  I couldn’t really see anything other than a night sky not completely dark.  

I then asked my dad what he was pointing at because I thought maybe I wasn’t looking in the right direction.  And he again pointed right above us, and I looked again and I still couldn’t see lots of stars, and I might have asked what the Milky Way looks like, having never seen it before.

And my father just looked at me – I could see that – and he pointed again and with frustration and concern rising in his voice he said, “You don’t see that? You don’t see the Milky Way? You don’t see all the stars?”  And I looked again and after a moment, I shook my head and said no.  I didn’t have the slightest idea what it was I wasn’t seeing. 

After a moment of silence, my dad started off again to our campsite and I followed, now turning from gazing into the night sky and seeing nothing, to the light my flashlight cast once more upon the asphalt road, the only light, besides the fires and Coleman lanterns at the campsites we were passing, that I was saw that night.

Now I knew my father was upset that I was not able to see the Milky Way or all the bright stars, but I knew that he wasn’t upset with me for I was his son, but that he was upset because I couldn’t see something he did and he didn’t understand this and he didn’t know what to do about it, my father, quiet and even gentle, who could always fix everything.

And I was a little sad because I could not see the Milky Way, for now I did not really know what it was, or why my father was so excited for me to see it. For with my eyes, as they were without glasses, which only came years later, within my visual vocabulary, I did not possess stars, or constellations, or shooting stars, let alone the Milky Way, whatever that was.

So now, on those clear nights when the moon rises in the  southeast and the moonlight plays through the leaves and again creates seemingly a dance of starlights – a captured night sky – I behold constellations of life and wonder within the inexpensive molded glass vase of the lamp on my nightstand – a very small vision of what I could not see when I was ten.

And now, with the night sky occasionally captured within the vase of the lamp, it is now a time of peace, and thoughtful halfway smiles about parts of my past now long past – one also now bathed with more understanding – and of eventual sleep as my eyes close on the starlights winking into my eyes.

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