Through the broken clouds of the Virginia night, I watched the waxing moon make its way westward until at last, it was nestled between Jupiter and Saturn, emblazoned as a trinity on the indigo sky. Jupiter, so bright and obvious, jumping out against the dark, almost competing for prominence with the nearly full moon, showed me why he became the king of the Gods, lording his presence over the other planets… like Saturn, clearly visible, but fainter, almost able to be mistaken for a star. Left to right, they glowed – Jupiter, Luna, and Saturn – same as they have been for thousands or maybe millions of years, serving as a reminder of my mortality, the decades it has taken for me to question my self-importance long enough to look skyward and contemplate the great insignificance of my individual existence.
I wouldn’t be able to tell a planet from a star without my father. He’s the one who taught me that all the planets and the moon travel around the Earth in roughly the same orbital plane, called the ecliptic, so they are easy to find, especially in Autumn when the sun goes down earlier. There is that moment of dusk when the sun has gone down and all you can see is the crescent moon and Venus and later, maybe Jupiter and Saturn or perhaps even Mars, the reddish one, before any stars are visible. And in those brief moments when the sun stops dominating the sky but the great darkness with its canopy of stars has not quite taken over, it is obvious that these few heavenly bodies are closer to us, one of us, in a way that the stars are not.
You can see it. See for yourself that they are closer. You can see the contours of Jupiter without a powerful telescope. Venus is impossibly bright just before she slips away below the horizon and gives way to the stellar show beyond. I don’t think people are looking at the sky. I think if one percent of all the people in Charlotte knew they could see Jupiter next to the moon, that would be the most in any city in America.
We are oblivious to the celestial constants, the big patterns we are part of, the bedrock of what’s so. These heavenly bodies have been a dominant influence on humanity for eons, determining our systems of faith, representing the Gods, living at the core of our midst and creation stories. You couldn’t walk the Earth in pre-industrial times without being aware of the impact of these lights in the sky. Humans took them seriously, observed them religiously, paid attention to the changes, and changed their behaviors based on what was “written in the stars”.
Nowadays, if it’s not on TV, it isn’t real. Unless Jupiter gets its own program on Netflix, it will have to settle for being the largest planet in the solar system that no one knows how to find. I said, “Look, you can see two planets tonight.” My companions turned and gazed at the northern sky. I concealed that I was shaking my head. It would be no use to say, “You idiots, that’s not the direction to see planets. From the northern hemisphere where we are, planets will always be toward the south, where the ecliptic runs. Oh, never mind, you don’t care or understand why I do.”
It’s the same reason I always know east from west by just looking around. I know which direction streets run, too, and not from studying maps: from listening to Dad, who taught me to know my location, not just relative to human landmarks like stores and gas stations, but my location on the planet, my approximate longitude and latitude and the direction of the sun. I know when I’m at home that I’m at roughly 35 degrees North latitude and 80 degrees West longitude, that Felton’s house is to the west and the view out to the backyard is north. I don’t have to think about that any more than I have to think about where my car is parked. It just takes a second to remember.
But that’s all because I am the son of my father – he of the long night flights over the Pacific and the secret patrols over the South China Sea during the Vietnam War and the classes in celestial navigation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
“Do you know what Columbus did to figure out where he was? Dad would ask my younger self. “He’d shoot the sun, using a sextant.” And then Dad would respond to my quizzical look with a detailed explanation of how to “shoot the sun”.
Now it comes second nature to pay attention to the night sky, to distinguish planets from stars, to understand how small we are. Dad taught these things not so that we would learn them, but because he couldn’t help it. He was always so fascinated, so feverishly interested in the details of how things worked, that he was just sharing, bubbling over with enthusiasm, and if we actually retained anything, that would be a bonus. Mostly, he was engaging us and at his own level, which we could rise to or not, but he would not dumb it down. He used terms like longitude and sextant, long before I knew those words. In the third grade, I climbed into bed next to him one evening and began reading his book. It was Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, about Mexicans in Monterey where we had lived, and had dialogue with cuss words. He let me read it as long as I wanted to. Mostly, I remember that Daddy let me read his grownup book.
Dad doesn’t know what he really gave me. Sure, lots of knowledge, lots of support, and his time. But even when he was gone, he gave me something as a little boy that was invisible. As a Navy brat, I got used to the question, “What does your dad do?” I gave the simple answer without hesitation. “He’s a Navy pilot.”
The gift of those four words is what Dad gave me. Call it confidence, call it certainty. Call it a good answer. All I know is that I didn’t get many follow-up questions. Whatever you had to say about your dad’s job, I was pretty sure it wasn’t as cool as being a Navy pilot. It handled so much for me, having that answer. Navy pilot – deal with it. As a young boy with glasses, who talked too much and wasn’t that athletic, it was my superpower. By junior high, it had an edge. Although I didn’t say it out loud, what I meant was “My dad is a freaking Navy pilot, which means he could probably beat up your dad, so don’t even think about fucking with me.”
It was cool, impossibly cool, something you couldn’t make up and something you would like to make up if you could. I can’t overestimate the gift that it was to have a cool dad, and not just that I thought he was cool, but to have that caché, that coolness that is undeniable, not just my opinion, objectivelycool.
I was never embarrassed of my dad, always proud, so much that it went into the background, part of my bedrock, part of what makes my confidence in myself unassailable. “Hey, my dad’s a Navy pilot and so you can kiss my ass.” But it’s even better than that. Because I never once said that to anyone, didn’t need to advertise, unbecoming.
Being proud of my dad gave me something inside in my backbone, in my soul, like I was part of a bigger mission, one I don’t expect you to understand.
But understand this – you can’t touch me. You can’t shake me. You can’t dominate me. You cannot make me question my worth. My dad’s a Navy pilot.
I didn’t see him flying, of course. That was all imagined from his stories and seeing the planes on the ground at the airbase. So, I never experienced the thing that made him transcendently cool, but he was cool in other ways, such as the Honda motorbike he got in Japan. I knew the other first-graders at the school in Iwakuni would not believe my stories of riding on a motorcycle on the narrow raised path between rice paddies, or lifting my feet to keep from getting wet when Daddy careened across a mountain stream on the dirt trails above town. But I knew it was really cool.
Later, in Florida, I felt so cool fishing with him on the catwalks along the Highway One bridge between the Keys, waiting for cars to pass so we wouldn’t hit them with our baited hooks while casting for red snapper and yellow grunt. He was my Cub Scout Packmaster in Key West, and we won the Pinewood Derby one year with an orange car he helped me carve and paint. Very cool to have the dad in charge and to walk away a winner.
When it came time for the ceremony graduating from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts, Dad performed a ritual with the lights out, putting lighter fluid or something on a boy’s neckerchief so it would flame up like a fancy dessert, while not burning the cloth. The other boys had one word for it – wicked! Which means cool, of course.
At the big pool on the base where all the families swam, Dad would play with us more than the other dads who did boring things like swim laps. Dad swam the length of the pool all right, but underwaterthe whole way and with one of us clinging to his neck. We had a signal to pull on his neck if we needed to come up for air. Otherwise, he would use his pilot survival training techniques and swim underwater, near the bottom, for the length of the pool. They practiced this so they’d be ready to swim out from under a large patch of burning oil, which was likely to cover the water at the site of a plane crash. So, this was how to live through being shot down over the ocean. I prided myself on not pulling on his neck, holding my breath all the way to the other side of the pool.
But the coolest trick at the pool was being launched. Dad would stand in the part of the pool just too deep for us and we’d swim up to him and grab his shoulders. Then, we’d lie prone on the surface, hands extended out in front, feet together, and he’d lift us. With his left hand supporting my chest, his right hand grasping my ankles together, he’d say, “Ready?” I’d assume my best Superman pose, making myself into a missile, an arrow, and he would throw me like a javelin, my hands splitting the water yards away and I’d glide as far as I could before starting to swim. I’d pop my head up and look back at him to let him know I was okay. Every time, it seemed a little dangerous, which was part of the thrill. What I never saw, but always imagined, were the jaws dropping on the mothers and kids who just saw a man launch his boy halfway across the pool. And all I felt was cool.
I don’t flatter myself by thinking he did it for me. I was only one of his five children. He did it for himself. He thought he was pretty cool himself. But the gift of a cool dad is the gift that keeps on giving. That feeling of confidence, a kind of inner peace I only found words for as an adult, is rare and priceless.
Thanks Dad!