I once was blind, but now I see!

Go see Deep Sky, a movie about the James Webb Space Telescope. It will rock your little world in a positive way...

The Pillars…where we all started.

I am not a religious person.

I’m not an atheist. I would say I was pleasantly agnostic. But while watching this film about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may not change your life, but it will give you some perspective you didn’t have before you saw it.

OK, it could change your life.

I was always an astronomy nerd as a kid. I saved up $50 to buy a Sears 2 1/4” refractor telescope when I lived in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside of Philadelphia. Inspired by NASA, Star Trek, Space Food Sticks (yuck), and Tang, I become obsessed with stargazing. I built a little observatory out of plywood and set it up in our big backyard in what was, a year earlier, a cornfield.

In fact, my main career goal was to become an astronomer.

Later, people reliably informed me that astronomy required math and physics.

Being a liberal arts cartoon doodler on the margins of my math tests was probably an early tell that I wasn’t cut out for the life of an astronomer. I read about astronomy voraciously as a child. One of my favorite books was a Scholastic Book called “The Search for Planet X”.

That’s Pluto, which is now, sadly, no longer considered a planet. It’s back to being a Disney character again, which is sad, because Pluto is an idiot.

The star—sorry— of the book was an astronomer named Clyde W. Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto. I thrilled to the escapades of Clyde W. Tombaugh, who, as a child and teenager, built his own telescopes. I don’t know if I can find the book now (I think I know where it is, but I have to finish this and eat a dinner prepared by my son, a fine chef), but it made a huge impression on me.

I’ve read that billions and billions (Sagan joke) of young people were inspired to become aeronautical engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and astronomers so they could at work at NASA by the television program Star Trek.

I wasn’t really a Trekkie, but I was Trekkie-adjacent. My younger brother Jim was, and I once took him to see Gene Roddenberry speak in Minneapolis when I was 16 or so. I did like the show, however, watched a lot of it in reruns, and get the appeal.

I don’t know who the original NASA people were inspired by, but there was Buck Rogers, Jules Verne, and lots of authors, movies, and comic strips in the 1930s and 1940s who, I am sure, were Depression Trekkies before there were Trekkies.

Maybe they were inspired by Clyde W. Tombaugh, who I just discovered (that’s all the astronomical discovery I am capable of) died in 1997 at age 91. That means he got to see almost the full realization of manned space flight. I wish I had Wikipedia then. Fortunately, he didn’t experience the astronomical ignominy of seeing his planet reclassified as a really solid piece of space rock.

I have owned several serious telescopes as an adult: a 10” and 12” Meade, which weighed 88 pounds on top of 50 pound tripod. Some creep stole my 12” Meade from my truck (I left the door unlocked), so I later bought an 8” Celestron, an easy to use and lighter model that really has indistinguishable optics compared to my old howitzer Meade.

I went blind during the pandemic, due to cataracts. The saddest thing was I couldn’t see any stars at all for years. I waited out the pandemic for 14 months, and went to the ophthalmologist, who informed me that I was legally blind.

The lab tech showed me the eye chart.

“What do you see?”

“I see a white square,” I said, knowing there was a full set of letters there.

“You don’t see any letters?”

“I do not.”

“Okay, you’re blind, you have 20/500 vision, and we’re gonna fix that.”

They showed me an iPad with a video about the procedure, which involved a scalpel on an eyeball. Then my doctor said, “Well, your insurance will pay for the scalpel, but for $2800 more out of pocket, you can have the laser surgery.”

I said, “Are you upselling me?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Don’t ever show me the effing video ever again, and thanks for the upsell.”

When I went in for the surgery, I took a mental snapshot of the last moments of my blindness. It was like a Monet watercolor, blurry leafy trees, gray sky, fuzzy vehicles.

An hour later, I walked out with an eyepatch and strict instructions to move very gingerly for several days.

I took the eyepatch off the next day, and saw a neighbor’s facial expression from 100 feet across our street. I wept.

I went from seeing a Monet to seeing a Chuck Close.

For those of unfamiliar with Chuck Close, he was a photorealistic painter who seemed to specialize in facial pores and errant nose hairs.

I took the rest of the week off. My editor said, what are you going to do?

“I’m going to look at shit.”

I spent three days wandering around looking at grass, insects, birds, fly tying stuff, clouds, frighteningly clear television images that included a smallmouth bass I thought would flop off the screen, and my far-more aged, moley face than I was used to seeing.

I’ll never chirpily say, “GUESS HOW OLD I AM!” ever again. 63 and heavy change, babe.

Finally, I saw stars.

I was up on the American River fishing with my buddy Paul Estridge, who is a retired English teacher, and always rattling off poems he had memorized (Oxford comma?). He’s a delightful guy who has become a great fishing pal.

After we caught some trout (I saw mayflies, moss, sticks, tail fins, brush, grass, all of it very visually distracting, really), it was getting dark, so we sat up at the top of the hill (we were in rural El Dorado County), and the stars out there were, well, stunning. We watched satellites, planets, planes, the Milky Way (You Are Here), and it was probably one of the most moving moments of my life.

I once was blind, and now I see.

The moon landing was an epochal event, mankind’s greatest achievement ever, except for sending William Shatner into space at age 90.

Now, that was cool!

Ten thousand scientists and engineers from all over the world came together to build, launch, and utilize the JWST. To see the engineering of this marvel was astounding. Of course, the Hubble Space Telescope was astounding if mechanically flawed (it required a special shuttle mission to repair it), but, by God, they repaired it.

The mirror of the JWST is 23 feet across, if I recall correctly. The largest earthbound telescope is the 200” whopper at the Mt. Palomar Observatory in SoCal, and it was a marvel of its time. Let us not forget the VLA (Very Large Array) radio telescope, either. The JWST mirror looks precisely like a golden honeycomb, and had to be folded up to fit on the Ariane booster when it launched on Christmas Day, 2021.

When it went up, I recall very little conversation about it. In fact, NASA put a car on Mars in 2012, and no one said much about that, either.

Let me repeat: Mankind put a car on Mars. A car. It landed on Mars using balloons and chutes. And there are hours of videos from the Mars Mobile (Ask the Martian Who Owns One), and you couldn’t get that from you local Dodge Boys dealer, either. I watched this in tears then, and it was beyond exhilarating.

I went into work the next day, and it was all how about them Blazers, huh? Amazing!

No. There’s a car on Mars, and that’s slightly more amazing.

As Deep Sky progressed (it’s only 40 minutes), the stunning photographs are shown, and if Hubble got some of the same images, but fuzzy, the JWST had them at alarming clarity.

Uncounted galaxies our Milky Way galaxy’s size, supernovas, black holes, planetary systems, nebulas, you name it, were all right there, photographed by humans, made from atoms, just like the stars themselves.

I hate it when writers say they have no words, but write words. I do have words, but that’s it.

Here they are: when you are shown the literal origin of the Big Bang on a screen, shown a 13.4 billion year old galaxy (it’s red), and if you are not anything other than in tears, you need an attitude adjustment that I cannot provide.

At the Esquire, a fine old barn on K Street in fabulous downtown Sacramento, there were five people in the theater. They did charge me $6.83 for a Vitamin Water.

Bastards.

You show the face of God, and you get five people to show up at 5:45 PM when it’s 110 degrees.

I went with my dear friends Mike Sicilia and Lucinda Hitchcock Cone, a first-rate Bay Area actress, and they graciously listened to me ramble about my new perspective on life, which I desperately need at this precise moment in American history. They are practiced at listening to me orate/bloviate/ wax, and I am eternally grateful.

What I said was something like, this changed my life, I feel like I am part of something, it got me out of my political headspace for 40 minutes, and I had a new love for humanity, scientists, physics, and connected me, again, to my boyhood love of astronomy. It even featured eternal life, for we are atoms, as a scientists said in the film, and they do not go away.

We are atoms, and we will return to the stars eventually.

No religion can spin that into hate.

It’s just science, but it’s more than science.

It’s communion.

We all need that.

Go see this movie.