With all this talk about asteroids and meteors, I am reminded of one of my and Barbra's Lucy moments, as in Lucille Ball. (Barbra is our daughter.) I had just gotten a new telescope for my husband Bruce's birthday and the whole family was anxious to try it out. Darkness couldn't come quickly enough. Since we live near the beach, city lights are not too much of a problem, so looking heavenward toward the stars on a cloudless night offered a bounty of constellations and brilliance. This particular night happened to have a full moon shining. How perfect. We set the telescope up at the end of our driveway. We read the directions by flashlight and looked in the eyepiece to see the bright red of the traffic light half a mile away. We were giddy with delight.
"This is a deep space scope," said Bruce. "We should be able to see the craters of the moon with this thing." Excitement was ours. We outfitted the proper lenses in the proper position and each took a peek at the moon.
Let me rephrase that. We each tried to take a peek at the moon. None of us could see it through the telescope. "Now, wait a minute," said Mark, my son-in-law. "This should be easy. We look at the moon with our naked eyes, make sure the lens cap is off, point the thing at said moon and..." Looking in the eye hole place again, "Where the heck is it?" (Or something similar with a bit of colorful language added.)
Bruce tried. Mark tried repeatedly. We battled the flying jaws (no see-ums) nipping at our scalps, the buzzing mosquitoes and the chill in the air. After an hour, the men announced they were going inside to watch TV. Not to be undone, Barbra and I put on jackets, and doused ourselves in bug spray. We looked, she turned it, we changed lenses, I twirled dials, we aimed at the stars, at the moon, at anything. Alas, we saw nothing but black.
As I was about to suggest we give up and donate the contraption to charity, Barbra burst forth with, "I've got it! I've found the moon!"
Never doubting my child, nevertheless, I had to make confirmation. With fingers crossed, I looked in the eye piece and there is was! The moon, our moon! The same moon our very own astronauts walked upon and we were seeing it up close and personal, craters and all!
"Step away from the scope," I ordered. "If you sneeze, you might jar it and our moon may be lost to us forever. I'll get the men. We'll show them!"
All hunkered down, watching some violent drug movie they'd each seen ten times, it took a great deal of my persuasive power, aka whining, and the bribery of a pan of freshly baked brownies to lure them out to the driveway to see our discovery. First Mark took a gander. Then Bruce. Then, then, then.... they started laughing at us. The nerve! Here we had braved relentless insects and tropically chilly temps of some 64 degrees, give or take, and there they were, laughing at us. We thought the dolts would be glad, happy and proud of us, the same as Barbra and I were of ourselves.
"I fail to see the humor," I snarkily said.
"Me either," Barbra concurred. "You guys just won't admit that Mom and I found the moon when you two couldn't."
"My darling," Bruce said, still laughing. "You didn't find the moon. What you found was the driveway. You have the telescope pointing at the cement and the craters you're seeing are the little holes in the concrete."
"Look in the eyepiece," Mark said. He squatted down, ran his hand back and forth between the scope and the drive and, with each pass of that hand, our moon disappeared then reappeared.
The last I heard of the not so dear old telescope, it was making the rounds through the family. Whoever could find the moon or anything besides a traffic light was the winner and, you guessed it, their prize was ownership of same. All I can say is, "Viva la planetarium!"
