a sky gone on fire (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
askygoneonfire) wrote2010-06-01 11:36 pm
askygoneonfire) wrote2010-06-01 11:36 pm
NaBloPoMo - When I Grow Up I Want to Be....
Writing Prompt for Tuesday, June 1, 2010
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I couldn't decide between two careers. For years - until I was about 12 and discovered I wasn't great at maths - I wanted to be either a vet or an astronaut.
A vet for the very simple. and largely uninteresting reason that I liked animals. The astronaut ambition has more interesting motivations...
Some of my earliest memories are laying in bed waiting to go to sleep and I would sing to myself. All the songs I sang would be about the stars, or the moon, or the sun. Somehow I just arrived in the world with an innate wonder at the celestial display.
My Dad taught me to adore and respect Nature. I think, deep down, he's a Romantic in the most absolute sense, he understands the Sublime in a way few Romantic writers could ever manage to express. In the appreciation and awe of Nature comes a sense of the absolute wonder at the fact of our planet.
My Dad also assured me that there were and are aliens out there. It sounds laughable but my Dad is not prone to flights of fancy, he rarely if ever reads fiction and is a salt-of-the-earth type. But one night, in the early 80's, when he was still a policeman he was on a night patrol with a fellow officer and they were in a stretch of open ground. Suddenly a bright light shot to earth and hovered a few feet above the ground. It was so bright my Dad struggled to look directly at it. He tried to approach but as he got close enough to really *see* what he was looking at the light shot back up in the air, hovered overhead for a few seconds and then jetted into the atmosphere.
He still has a copy of the official report he filed after this inexplicable event. It was duly investigated - which is to say the RAF and Air Traffic Control were contacted and requested to supply any pertinent information which might explain the spectacle. There was no explanation available. My Dad is, to this day, convinced of what he saw.
As a kid this made a dramatic impact upon me. My imaginative world exploded. I had no doubt that aliens existed; that every space expedition brought us a little closer to a bigger universe. I used to ask my parents exactly how many years it would be before we could live on the moon. I played endlessly with my lego space-base set and sang David Bowie's Space Oddity as I played; just the first verse and chorus, over and over again.
Of course, my absolute faith in my Dad's judgement waned, as it is want to do as we mature. Indeed it was around the same time I came to the conclusion that there was no God and that Christianity was well intentioned twaddle that I also concluded my Dad was not lying in as much as he believed what he saw, but that he was mistaken - it was not irrefutably alien life, there were as many terrestrial explanations as extra. And then, then I stopped wanting to be an astronaut.
<tr></tr>
...more or less.
What came with maturity, with disentangling my personality from my parents as children do as they grow up, was fear. Awareness of the hugeness of earth, the fragility of life, my own mortality. And space ceased to be a gap waiting to be filled and took on a new role as a hostile....it is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence. Oh shit, hang on, I just turned into Bones....but you get the idea.
The power of stars, the beauty of our Earth, my continuing astonishment at the many and various ways the natural landscape can alter in a second through the combined forced of our atmosphere and the barely known powers beyond....all these things have not yet lost their power over me.
One of the things I miss the most about living in a city is losing the stars. In the country the sky is full, every night. One of the most remarkable sights I ever saw were the stars in the Southern Hemisphere one night, in Australia, from the deck of a tall ship in the Whitsundays. I will never forget falling asleep to that spectacular display.
And somewhere in there is the reason I'm not an astronaut. I think.
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I couldn't decide between two careers. For years - until I was about 12 and discovered I wasn't great at maths - I wanted to be either a vet or an astronaut.
A vet for the very simple. and largely uninteresting reason that I liked animals. The astronaut ambition has more interesting motivations...
Some of my earliest memories are laying in bed waiting to go to sleep and I would sing to myself. All the songs I sang would be about the stars, or the moon, or the sun. Somehow I just arrived in the world with an innate wonder at the celestial display.
My Dad taught me to adore and respect Nature. I think, deep down, he's a Romantic in the most absolute sense, he understands the Sublime in a way few Romantic writers could ever manage to express. In the appreciation and awe of Nature comes a sense of the absolute wonder at the fact of our planet.
My Dad also assured me that there were and are aliens out there. It sounds laughable but my Dad is not prone to flights of fancy, he rarely if ever reads fiction and is a salt-of-the-earth type. But one night, in the early 80's, when he was still a policeman he was on a night patrol with a fellow officer and they were in a stretch of open ground. Suddenly a bright light shot to earth and hovered a few feet above the ground. It was so bright my Dad struggled to look directly at it. He tried to approach but as he got close enough to really *see* what he was looking at the light shot back up in the air, hovered overhead for a few seconds and then jetted into the atmosphere.
He still has a copy of the official report he filed after this inexplicable event. It was duly investigated - which is to say the RAF and Air Traffic Control were contacted and requested to supply any pertinent information which might explain the spectacle. There was no explanation available. My Dad is, to this day, convinced of what he saw.
As a kid this made a dramatic impact upon me. My imaginative world exploded. I had no doubt that aliens existed; that every space expedition brought us a little closer to a bigger universe. I used to ask my parents exactly how many years it would be before we could live on the moon. I played endlessly with my lego space-base set and sang David Bowie's Space Oddity as I played; just the first verse and chorus, over and over again.
Of course, my absolute faith in my Dad's judgement waned, as it is want to do as we mature. Indeed it was around the same time I came to the conclusion that there was no God and that Christianity was well intentioned twaddle that I also concluded my Dad was not lying in as much as he believed what he saw, but that he was mistaken - it was not irrefutably alien life, there were as many terrestrial explanations as extra. And then, then I stopped wanting to be an astronaut.
<tr></tr>
...more or less.
What came with maturity, with disentangling my personality from my parents as children do as they grow up, was fear. Awareness of the hugeness of earth, the fragility of life, my own mortality. And space ceased to be a gap waiting to be filled and took on a new role as a hostile....it is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence. Oh shit, hang on, I just turned into Bones....but you get the idea.
The power of stars, the beauty of our Earth, my continuing astonishment at the many and various ways the natural landscape can alter in a second through the combined forced of our atmosphere and the barely known powers beyond....all these things have not yet lost their power over me.
One of the things I miss the most about living in a city is losing the stars. In the country the sky is full, every night. One of the most remarkable sights I ever saw were the stars in the Southern Hemisphere one night, in Australia, from the deck of a tall ship in the Whitsundays. I will never forget falling asleep to that spectacular display.
And somewhere in there is the reason I'm not an astronaut. I think.