A Chance Meeting with Cosmic Mystery

Cosmic mystery has always held a deep attraction for me, especially as presented by a starlit sky; and so, it was without hesitation that I agreed when my husband asked if I would like to take a walk to the park to see if we could catch a glimpse of the predicted meteor shower. As a child, I remember spending many nights sitting on my parent's porch in Florida gazing at the stars overhead with awe and wonder while mouthing the words of that children's incantative plea to their power in the hopes of being granted my wish. But, living in Manhattan has always made me feel starved of this simple communion with mystery that I had taken for granted as everyone's prerogative; and so it was with hope tempered by doubt that we sauntered off together to Union Square Park in search of a meteor shower.

In the center of the park lay an area of grass surrounded by fence put there presumably so that the grass would be protected from people walking and sitting on it, an idea unheard of in the country or the suburbs. What else is grass made for, but to walk, sit or lay upon and to feel against the bare skin of feet, hands, or small of back? So I along with others squeezed through the opening in the fence to enter the grassy knoll and gaze upward at the sky through the only space not obstructed by buildings or trees.

I had only gone a few feet, however, when I realized that the people lying on the grass before me were not, as I had presumed, other star-gazers, but the city's homeless population who had made these open spaces their bed and shelter for the night. One of the men who lay upon a corrugated cardboard mattress pointed upward and shouted in our direction, "Look, there's one. Do you see it?" Suddenly someone passed us quickly from behind and in a flash the two stood but a few feet in front of us pointing and looking upward in enthusiastic recognition of something it seemed only the two of them could see. We had seen nothing and told them so when they turned to us and pointed in the hopes of drawing us into their discovery. They moved toward us excitedly and positioned themselves beside us, one on each side. As they did, both my husband and I became fearful anticipating that they were readying themselves for an attack. Living in New York City teaches one to be immediately skeptical and defensive; we guard ourselves not against the dangerous forces of nature, but the unexpected yet perpetual onslaught of others.

But these two obviously homeless and needy men had no ulterior motive in mind when they approached us other than the sharing of that which I too felt - the wonder of cosmic mystery. One of the two, recognizing the tension we felt, soon moved away and back to his portable bed, but the other stayed with us. He talked to us of the stars, their grandeur and of his dreams.

Bobby was a young man in his mid to late 30's with an attractive face and soulful eyes and was cleanly by homeless standards. He was so open and animated in conversation and seemed so in need of our acceptance of him as a peer that I could not help but stay and listen despite my instinct to flee.

He told us of his love for astronomy and of his struggle against a drug addition that began in Vietnam, his fear of being killed while on the streets and his determination to think more positively about his future. He was in a methadone program now and wanted to get into a six-month rehabilitation facility in upstate New York and begin a new life for himself. When he spoke of astronomy he was extremely knowledgeable, citing scientific and mathematical data with such ease and simplicity that I thought, if circumstances had been different, he could have been another Carl Sagan.

He narrated the story of the creation of suns and stars and other planets, discoursed on the speed of light, black holes, the distance between the earth and other planets, and the effects of space travel on the aging process. "Each star was one of many suns in our galaxy", he said, "and each sun, like our own, had planets that revolved around it." As he told of how looking at the stars and planets as a little boy through a neighbor's homemade telescope and seeing Saturn with its rings at a distance that so was close that it seemed he could reach out and touch it had begun his love for astronomy, I could still see that little boy filled with hope and wonder alive in him and I was filled with sadness and an awareness of the humanity in us all.

As we spoke further we discovered that we had a common friend. He had once worked for and shared an apartment with a man we both knew. He was no longer a stranger, but he was an alien in his own land. Alienated by a society whose fear of failure and defensive critical judgements allows them to ignore another's humanity and look away from the darker side of life; but who knows what cosmic forces cause one person's life to go astray and another's to stay on track and is it not true perhaps that "there but for the Grace of God go I?"

I had gone in search of cosmic mystery revealed to me from the distant heavens, instead I found a piece of it right in my own back yard.

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