Sunday, September 1, 2013

Starry, starry night

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
 
My Grade 2 teacher, Miss McElhone way back in 1975
in a brand new, three-room plus one portable school
in smalltown Ontario
 (actually one big room separated into three by room dividers)
taught us that the number "googooplex"
was the highest number in the world,
one less than infinity.
 
(She also taught me the difference between its and it's,
and every time I am writing something and stop and think which
form I am using, I think of her, but that's beside the point.)
 
For the last couple of nights, Miss McElhone,
There have been a googooplex and one stars in the sky.
I wonder if you saw them too.
 
Truly awe-inspiring to realize how insignificant we are
In the general scheme of things. 
 
My world is my world
A different world than anyone else's
Just as everyone else's is different than anyone else's.
 
My world is defined by what my life revolves around.
My life revolves around my world.
 
But looking out at the incomprehensible vastness
of what is really but a fleck in the entire scheme
makes one realize just how insignificant we really are.
 
Some of us have changed the world
All of us have just changed our own slice of it
But there is nothing that any of us can do
To change the entirety.
 
Makes one a little humble
and it may not even be healthy to think that way all the time
because while we may not be able to change the universe
or even our earthly world
 
To someone
We may mean the world
 
                       -the end-
 
 

2 comments:

  1. It's funny what touches our memories and causes them to surface. I've never heard this term before so learned something new.

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  2. What a great song (am listening to it as I write). I went to a school like that - it was a 1-room, 8-row/8-grade country school - I shall never forget the tough-as-nails Mrs Sommerville who ruled ! In later years it was Miss Stull (before the days of 'Ms') who drilled us in its-it's, they're-there-their, your-yore-you're, etc which none of us will ever forget.

    Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Great post.

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