The Starry Night

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An after-hours work party 10 summers ago changed my attitude toward life.

Following a familiar party pattern, I’d spent the bulk of my evening wandering from colleague to colleague bitching and moaning about the perceived injustices being foisted upon me by the upper management where I worked as a marketing associate.

“That guy should be a bouncer not a vicepresident.”

“I’m not going to take that sales development program. It turns you into a Stepford-employee.”

“To get promoted around here, you need to be willing to stab folks in the back and the front.”

I stopped my social flutter when I struck up a conversation with Gene, a colleague I’d only exchanged candy stories with in front of the vending machine. He preempted my rant with, “Want to go outside?” Married, I hesitated at first. Didn’t he see this big hulking diamond ring on my finger? I decided if he got too frisky I’d just set him straight.

He led me to the middle of the backyard in the quiet residential neighborhood, stopped and said, “Look up.”

Hundreds of stars decorated the blackened sky. “Oh, my,” I said to Gene, completely captivated by the front-row view. “I haven’t gazed at the stars since summer camp.”

“See that bright one?” he pointed to with his index finger. “It’s Jupiter. And that constellation south of it? Sagittarius, The Archer.”

The stars humbled and awakened me at the same time. An almost forgotten nursery rhyme pranced through my head.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are?
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are?

For the first time in my life, I acknowledged those lyrics. What are stars? What am I? What is this mystery I see before me? Although I didn’t have the answers, I felt connected to something greater than my bleak work existence. I felt part of something infinite, eternal and spiritual. I felt like Joe Bank in Joe Versus the Volcano when he jumped into the volcano prepared to die and jettisoned out into the ocean. And the words of the Patricia Graynamore character from that same movie spoke to me with a newfound sense of urgency:

“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.”