BONEYARD ASTERISMS — My father was stationed at Davis-Montham AFB in Tucson for two years as an ECM/EWOfficer on B-52s. It was 1957-59. We used to go the BONEYARD for dinners on the Air Force Blanket speed over the relentless, cooling sand. Each evening wed wait until my brother found the evening star Venus ... and at night, my dad would pull out the flashlight and poke holes in the heavens as hed stitches the stars together into asterisms. My sister would sit in his lap, my brother in my mothers lap as they would tell the stories of the firmament: grand stories of battles of titans and heroes, heroines and monsters, exotic creatures and magical beasts. Their conflicts were the stuff of legends. I would sit with a unfolded piece of dark blue construction paper and chalk and desperately try to keep up by drawing the star charts & asterisms. Scribe to master storytellers. One by one wed fall asleep and be carried back through the de-linked double fences from whence wed broken into the Boneyard. By morning, the stories remained ... but never the chalkline drawings. Years later Id follow the stars with study of Astronomy in school ... only to discover that the names of these constellations were based on the mythologies of mariners and astrologers, astronomers and soothsayers. None of them matched ours. For on those nights, my mother and father would connect the dots, name the constellations, and tell their stories of the trials and tribulations, failures and jubilations, conflicts and celebrations that matched our lives; as real in the re-telling as in the experiencing. The ailerons and rudders would creak in the desert breezes and the red-tagged-ribbon pull drapes on the engine cowlings would slap the sides of the wings like an applause of a thousands spectators. They were astonishing nights ... even more so when I discovered years later that the stories were all made up for us. On those nights we owned the heavens and became what we all would eventually become: scientists, teachers, architects, and most of all, storytellers.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:09:20 +0000
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