Star Date

I was brought up on a dairy farm, getting up at dawn to go and milk the cows. My foster father believed that classical music made the cows give more milk, and so we listened to the only station that played classical music in our part of the Great Plains. Prairie Public Radio. The juxtaposition of little kids milking cows to a chamber orchestra isn't lost on me. 

Along with the classical music, Prairie Public had other programming. There was jazz and folk music and electronic music (Hearts of Space, lots of Vangelis), and piano jazz with Marian McPartland, and then there was Star Date, which had to do with astronomy. I loved Star Date. Sometimes they'd give you some of the history of astronomy, or they would tell you when the meteor showers were due, or the aurora or which planets would be visible. I didn't have a telescope, but in the summer I would sometimes sleep outside under the sky to watch the falling stars. 

If there is one thing I miss about living out on the plains, it was the sky at night. It could be spectacular during the day, but at night it was beyond compare. Nowhere is the sky so big and clear. At night you can see all of the stars clearly, and it is nothing like looking up at the sky here. There you can see even the faintest stars because there is no light from below to compete with them. There it wasn't always cloudy. There I could see the milky way and the aurora. It was one of the redeeming features of the place. 

Looking at the stars was one of the things that fell by the wayside as I grew older, just like sketching and reading. Life and survival took priority, and you usually couldn't see the stars anyway. I am trying to reclaim the sense of wonder and curiosity that I had when I was younger. I didn't get to devote the time to my own interests that they really deserved. I think the stars appealed to me because they represented something bigger than me. Space, eternity, infinity. All of those things are profound things to contemplate, but they meant that the universe was out there, and that the little place where I grew up wasn't all there was to it. It was reassuring to understand that. 

By having Prairie Public playing in the milking parlor, the old bastard accidentally did me a favor in life. I was exposed to ideas like civilization and art and culture. I had a window on a world full of creativity and music. The news programming was unbiased and in-depth. No other radio station had all of the different things on it that Prairie Public did. I appreciate having something like that to sustain me at a time in my life when I didn't have much else. It let me know that the rest of the world was out there waiting for me to escape to it. It made me aware that there was more to it than just milking cows and staring off into the endless grassland wondering how long you'd have to walk to reach anything approaching civilization.