Starry Night

Memories are funny.

You can just be driving one day and for apparantly no reason a memory can pop into your mind. Sometimes I think that the brain cell that holds that memory is up for death and throws that memory out into your conscious so that if you want you can re-plant that memory in another brain cell.

Sometimes it happens in a dream where someone you haven't thought of in years plays a significant part or sometimes just driving and thinking and pop! there is is.

This time the memory is of the summer 1 year after I had graduated college. I was lucky enough to be a chapporone for a bunch of students from the residential high school for gifted students where I worked as they went on a field trip to the Florida Keys for a Biology camp.

One of the nights we were there we all went out on a boat to gather specimens. The sky was so full of stars and the warm breeze and gentle rocking of the boat was so miraculous that I almost fell into a trance.

Then the bio-guy who was leading that night's jaunt began to sing:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour,
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick
But out by us its just 3,000 light years wide
We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point,
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding Universe.
The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
12 million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there' bugger all down here on earth.

Now I knew this was from a Monty Python movie but with the magic that I was feeling, it felt like this guy was making it up on the spot and the stars were singing along with him.

I miss that feeling.