It was long ago and far away in another time and place. Much time was spent in the great outdoors. Crime and poverty didn’t seem to exist. Homes had expansive lawns and large front porches that were in frequent use by their occupants. Backyards were used extensively at night in the summertime to watch multitudes of fireflies and the Milky Way under dark clear skies.

Across the street from where I lived were undeveloped lots used as a park and planted as a jungle forest. My friends and I often cared for God’s beloved small creatures, stray cats and dogs, there. We frequently visited gracious neighbors and their beautiful gardens, and open fields nearby seemed to beckon us to run upon them. We were a privileged and coddled lot, my friends and I.

My father was an avid and rugged outdoorsman. We had many overnight fishing trips with blankets spread by the creek bank under open skies.

My mother, who was a brilliant and joyful person, seemed to know everything. She would patiently point out the constellations to me and tell me the names of various bright stars. She would have to tell me this frequently because the sky appeared to move and though I was fascinated, I would forget. She told me fascinating and intricate stories about ancient myths that past civilizations believed regarding the constellations. This held a deeply moving spiritual impact upon me.

Optical augmentation or enhancement by the use of a telescope or binoculars in such a dark but brilliant sky never occurred to me. It would seem distracting in retrospect when we had this beautiful canopied dome to view.

Later, there were social and technological waves of revolution in the form of air conditioning and televisions, which radically changed our way of life. Rarely did we look up at the night sky or think about it. People in large cities had never even seen the night stars. Our spiritual life seemed to falter. There didn’t seem to be pertinent needs to even know what phase the moon was in or to know the Judaic holidays, which are based upon moon phases.

There have been many astronomical happenings that I found impressive. These included unexplained mysteries, such as formations of large green balls of light rapidly moving in the night sky and explosions of blinding light in the dark sky, among others. In the realm of the more easily explained physical phenomenon, I have seen massive meteoric fireballs seemingly explode immediately overhead, visual impacts upon Jupiter, huge bright comets and meteor storms. Once after leaving a deathbed scene at one of our great Midwestern hospitals, I stopped on my drive to the family home at a farm once owned by old friends, now a wildlife refuge, and walked into a darkening field replanted with native buffalo grass and found myself surrounded by literally millions of fireflies brilliantly lighting my path and the new moon dark sky.

As interesting and impressive as I found these astronomical events and others, none of these approximated the spiritual, emotional, intellectual or plainly visceral impact and indelible impressions as the gestalt of my genesis of astronomical awakening in my early childhood. I remember the fascination of the romance, poetry and physics that the night sky held for me as I stood there amazed, gazing at the wondrous glories of our heaven.