Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

What does it take to make an experience valuable?

I was a college freshman and alone for reasons I don’t remember. It was unusual for me to be alone since there always seemed to be someone around, even when I didn’t want others around,but on this particular night I was bored out of my skull and had left a series of messages on my neighbor’s answering machine describing in excruciating detail just how bored I was. When I guessed the tape was nearly full I left a final one that ended with, “Being able to share my feelings in this way has given me an entirely new and happier outlook on life. I think I’m gonna go fly a kite.” All of which was, of course, completely untrue. I didn’t even have a kite. But I did get up and leave. I’d been hit with a sudden craving for Chinese food and like a lean and hungry hyena, or at least like a pudgy guy in a trenchcoat, I set forth in search of numbers five, nine, thirteen, and a handful of fortune cookies. The problem was the closest Chinese food place I knew of was three miles away. I had heard of Chinese places that delivered, but New York is a long way from Indiana and I doubted any of them were willing to make the trip. Besides I barely had enough to cover a cup of hot and sour soup, let alone the extremely generous tip they were bound to demand. So I called in my order. I wasn’t going to sit there in the restaurant and eat by myself because that would be weird. And set off on foot. Having measured my walking pace I’m guessing it took me about an hour to get there and even though there was a chill in the air I didn’t worry about my food getting cold on the trip back because it was already cold when I picked it up. And I returned my dorm and had a small feast that I wouldn’t say was fit for a king or even the general whose chicken I was allegedly eating, but at least it broke the boredom. And the next morning I felt like it had broken something else. I had an intense pain in my right foot. I couldn’t stand on it but could hobble along by leaning on walls or on friends. The student health center provided me with a pair of Civil War-era crutches and my parents considered fetching me home to Nashville where my father knew a podiatrist named Doctor Payne. And I kind of wish they had, not because things would have been any better but because when your doctor as a homonynomous moniker like that the jokes just write themselves. I even spun out elaborate imaginary introductions. “Hello. I’m Doctor Payne. I’ll be assisted today by my interns Doctors Hertz, Bledes, and Nurse Stab.”

Instead an aunt and uncle nearby took me to the hospital where I was doted on by the same doctor I’d seen about a month earlier when campus security took me to the emergency room at three a.m. with severe stomach pains that turned out to be the result of mixing caffeine pills with Coke. I’m pretty sure that same doctor was there twenty-four hours a day which, in a small town, probably isn’t unusual, but that’s another story.

It turned out I had a stretched tendon. At least that’s what I think he said since it was kind of hard to pay attention over the sound of the guy a few chairs away who was trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a baseball. I was told I needed to stay off my right foot for the next six weeks which was annoying because walking was my primary way of getting from point A to point B since geometry wasn’t covered in any of my math classes. And I was stuck with the campus crutches which I knew dated from the Civil War because they’d clearly been made for Abraham Lincoln, and even once I got the hang of using them I didn’t move from place to place so much as take flying leaps that luckily didn’t stretch any tendons in my left foot. And when I got bored in class I could amuse myself by picking termites out of them.

It was an interesting experience but I leave this question to you: was anything learned or was it in any other way valuable? Would it help if you could try the egg rolls?

Source: SkyView app

The other night I was dragging the garbage can up to the curb, one of those routine chores I always enjoy because I always do it after dark and walk through patches of shadow where anything could be lurking which, now that I mention it, is starting to make me wonder why I enjoy doing it and why I don’t do it earlier when it’s still light out even though it’s better to do it late to make sure I’ve gotten as much trash as possible because if anything’s left over we’ll be stuck with it for a week. And I enjoy it because while I’m dragging the can I look up at the sky which is another thing I didn’t think about until just now: the contrast between the earthy, grimy, trash and the ethereal, seemingly eternal sky above me. Really I’m just looking for planes. Or at the clouds. Most of the time I see the stars. At this time of year the night is also noisy. Even in our suburban neighborhood the children of the night, what music they make. I mean mostly bugs and frogs, of course, since we don’t have any wolves, or at least I haven’t seen any, but the little critters of nature know that they’re noisy. And they’re noisy because even though it doesn’t feel like it yet the summer is coming to an end. Their biological clocks are winding down and there’s a special urgency, one last desperate chance to meet that special someone. They’re brooding on the need to make a new brood.

It’s really the stars I focus on, though. Last night at the edge of the street I looked up and even through the pale orange glare of the streetlight I could see three bright stars in a line. They were part of the constellation Sagittarius which might have been more visible if that streetlight hadn’t been there. Beyond Sagittarius, though, is the Milky Way.

Strictly speaking Sagittarius is part of the Milky Way, and so is Earth, which is why it confused me when I was a kid when people talked about seeing the Milky Way. We’re in it, albeit far out in one of the outer arms. If it really were an arm I think we’d be just past the wrist and our galaxy also has more arms than a Hindu deity. So I thought saying “I can see the Milky Way” would be like standing in your closet and saying “I can see my house”. It wasn’t until one night on a camping trip in an extremely remote area on a cool late summer night that I actually saw the Milky Way, the band of shining, stellar clouds that stretches across the sky. According to the ancient Greeks it was formed when baby Heracles suckled on Hera in her sleep and some of her milk spilled out across the sky—a myth that was meant to explain the origins of the breast pump, but that’s another story.

There was something strange about looking into it, knowing that even though I could only see a small part of it I was still looking into the very heart of our galaxy. How did astronomers feel when they first realized our sun is just another star, and a pretty puny one at that? How did they feel when they first realized we only see mere ghosts of stars, that interstellar distances are so vast it takes years, even centuries, sometimes millennia, for the light of stars to reach us? The ground under their feet must have seemed a lot less stable. And in my lifetime alone astronomers, working with geologists, have come to understand the Earth’s long history of being hit by big rocks on a disturbingly regular basis—one about every twenty-six million years. The idea that a nearby star might be throwing wild pitches was dismissed almost as quickly as it was proposed, but the regularity might not be a cosmic coincidence either. Our solar system doesn’t stay in one place. Even as the Milky Way slowly turns the regularity of mass extinctions may be the result of the way our solar system bobs and weaves in its arm, perhaps taking us sometimes into dangerous territory. And some people get a kick out of saying we’re overdo for an interplanetary sucker punch, but a million years is a really long time. It may not happen.

Closer to home is the issue of light pollution, the growing number of photons we’re spewing into the sky nightly that make it harder and harder to see features like the Milky Way and smaller, dimmer stellar neighbors. It’s a scary thought that the more lights we use to light the night here on Earth the more we lose a perspective on our place in the universe, as if we were standing in a closet with no way to know what lurks in the patches of shadow.