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-