Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am not teaching this summer, so in order to justify my existence, I am doing some organizing of the family hoard. I make no secret of my philosophy in this type of endeavor: He who would organize must start out with an empty trash can.

With such an empty trash can in hand, I made my way toward the hoard. While I will be looking at everything the length of summer permits, I began with my own part of the hoard.  This consists of old school books, some of my juvenile writings, memorabilia from my Rotary Trip to Russia in the year 2000, and items of sentimental value.

I dug, moved, and organized.  I was prepared to be ruthless.  My mantra is: If you don’t know that you have it, then you don’t really have it.

Then I came upon the telescope.

If you follow popular astronomy as I do, you no doubt are aware of the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Telescope.  These have taken deep field images of the universe, showing that there are billions of galaxies that are contained in random areas of the sky that could be obscured by a grain of sand.  These telescopes not only look deeply into space, into the darkness, but they look far back in time. Billions of years.

When I looked at the telescope that was sitting forgotten on the shelf, it took me back in time.  I didn’t go billions of years–though sometimes it feels like it.  I was taken back more than 50 years into the darkness of the back yard of the house I grew up in.

I can see the spot in my mind with extreme clarity.  Describing it is quite difficult. The description is difficult in terms of language, but I am speaking more in terms of emotional fairness. I could begin by saying that we didn’t have air-conditioning: only a swamp-cooler that didn’t do a good job cooling the swamp. We didn’t have adequate plumbing: Our septic tank was homemade and tiny. We didn’t have adequate electrical wiring: We couldn’t plug in the electric skillet and do anything else.

But Dad would be quick to point out that we did have a floor that separated us from the dirt. We did have indoor plumbing. We did have electricity. And–I’d heard this many times–it was all paid for the day it was built.

In any case, I look back through those years and now see with extreme clarity that I was then–as I am now–an explorer of sorts. I tried to make things work; I thought I understood things that I didn’t.  

I had–and still have–a deep desire to learn.

I was young. A child. Maybe eight; maybe ten. I was out on the back porch at night, looking up at the sky. I’d taken a magnifying glass and was looking at the moon with it. I’d convinced myself that I could.  Dad saw this and took pity on me.

That coming Christmas he bought a telescope–this telescope I now have–for my brother and I.

In the Hollywood movies, this would now transition into me becoming first an amateur astronomer, and then going off to become a famous astronomer who was working on the James Webb Space Telescope.

That didn’t happen.

There is more to using a telescope than that.  You need to know how to aim it. You need to know where to aim it.  Pretty soon you need to buy cameras, etc.

This was all a non-starter for us.

We didn’t know how to do any of that and we weren’t networked to anyone who did know.  That was the condition of the rural working class at that time. 

We had the telescope.  We fiddled around with it a bit. We forgot about it.

Ultimately, I got interested in mathematics which I could pursue with the resources we had at hand: Paper, pencil, and lack of distractions. We had plenty of “the lack of distractions.”

So here I am, in my sixth decade of separation from that moment, looking back at it.

I am leaving a lot in the subtext of this article. It was going to go a different way, but I am going to leave it for you to figure out with your own telescopes, microscopes, and so forth.

I’ve still got to figure out what to do with mine.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com. He has several other stories about his travels in Paraguay posted there.