Look up in the sky

The older I get the less I follow that advice. As a youngster, I looked up a great deal. There was a lot to see up there. I am not sure why age has changed my outlook, or should I say upward look, but it has.

I noticed on the Internet news, that tomorrow night there is going to be a return of the famous Leonids meteor shower. As a kid we knew these shows by a different name, "falling stars."

A falling star was a magical thing to see as a kid. It has actually been years since I have seen one. When was the last time you saw one yourself?

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has the following information about Leonids. They "are a prolific meteor shower, associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo."

This famous meteor shower is most commonly seen in mid-November each year. As the earth passes through the dust left from the trail of the comet, the particles enter our atmosphere and radiate the light we call a "falling star."

I think the reason I haven't seen a "falling star" in a long time, is because I am so rarely outside at night like I was as a kid. When I was young, we lived on the crest of a prairie hill on DD Highway about a mile east of 71 Highway.

At that time, there was a lot less light conflicting with the night sky. When you drive around the country these days at night, there are lights everywhere. We had like, all the farms in our area, what we called a "yard light," but it was not left on all the time. It had a regular bulb instead of the now common mercury vapor lights that stay on all night long.

So, when I went outside at night, the entire heavens were visible. You could easily see the lights of Nevada which were about twelve miles to the north, but the rest of the skyline was dark. The stars were so brilliant, and they twinkled just like the words of the famous song. The "Milky Way" seemed like a snow bank of uncountable stars as it wound its way across the sky.

If you watched for just a few minutes, there was almost always a plane that would fly through the night view. I would always wonder as I watched the blinking colored lights of the craft, whether it was a regular plane or a jet.

Just a few months before my eighth birthday, the Russians launched the first satellite into earth orbit. I can still remember standing out in the yard with my father and his friend Loyd Ford, intently looking toward the sky to see if we could catch a glimpse of Sputnik.

It wasn't just at night that I looked vertically. As a kid I found countless things to watch up there. Birds were a common sight. There were always flocks of sparrows and similar birds flitting back and forth over our farm. Where were they going, and why did they always fly together? Only a kid thinks of such questions.

Clouds were another wondrous sight to behold. Sometimes I thought I could see shapes in the clouds that resembled animals or even people. In my young mind I tried to imagine what a cloud would feel like to touch.

Living on the top of that hill, I had a great vista from which to view the awesome power of thunderstorms. The fast moving black clouds were never frightening to me. In fact, to this day, I find a good thunderstorm a thing of beauty.

The lightening displays were especially entertaining. We would often count the seconds between the time when we could see the electricity flash across the sky, and then hear it. Somebody told us that every five seconds between the two represented about a mile in distance. That is actually pretty accurate.

BB guns and arrows were another part of my childhood skyline. Somewhere on that farm there is enough metal left over from the thousands of BB's shot from my Daisy air rifle, to create a significant artifact of some type.

I shot at just about everything that my young mind could think to attack. I did try to shoot at the birds, but luckily for them and me, I can never remember hitting one. I threw hundreds of items like cans in air to attempt a hit, again with little or no success.

My cousin and I entered our "bow and arrow" stage at some point during this time. We began by shooting at targets attached to bales of hay. Once we became bored with that practice, we turned our attentions again to the heavens.

We would pull our arrows back as far as possible and launch them skyward. It seems like only yesterday when we were watching those arrows fall from great heights back to earth. Again, we tried to shoot at birds, but their escape was never really in doubt.

In the afternoons, a famous television show "Superman" came on the air. The opening lines from the announcer are still familiar to me today. "Look, up in the sky. It's a bird. No, it's a plane. No, it's Superman." We would then watch Clark Kent save Lois or Jimmy from some disaster after he flew into the sky as "Superman."

Remote controls, recliners, cell phones, and any number of modern conveniences, keep many of us from taking a stroll outside to look upward these days.

We no longer seem to have the time or inclination to watch a bird or airplane fly across the sky. It's just too much trouble to get up and walk outside to try and see a "falling star." Well that's our loss, because there is a lot to see "UP THERE."