Anything, Everything, Nothing

When I was growing up, my Dad would take me on stargazing trips out into the Oregon desert. He and his friend Grabeer would set up their telescopes and redlights, consulting starmaps and swiveling their long black barrels at the sky. You could only see these stars in the clear desert air, away from civilization, and only at night. I probably never saw them so bright. So I could earn the Astronomy merit badge for Boy Scouts, Dad helped me to memorize twelve constellations. He'd point at portions of the sky, trying to diagram the artificial connections, the stars so far away that the slight wavering of his fingers seemed to be pointing at anything, everything and nothing at once. I eventually saw what he saw, connecting the dots in the ways they were supposed to be connected. I finally felt like I had it, like I owned some important understanding of cosmic forces that were actually unreachable and unknowable. I haven't looked much at the sky since, and have a hard time finding the old constellations.