Under the Milky Way

It’s odd the things I think about as I grow older. It’s seldom the big moments—funerals, graduations, my first kiss, the day I met the man whom I would later marry.

I do think about those things sometimes, but far more often, it’s the small things—quiet interludes, passing fancies, quirky memories—mostly mundane in nature. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stuff—parts of my life I took for granted, never giving them much thought until they were long gone.

These random recollections come to me more frequently than they used to. The most recent one was about milk jugs.

Yeah, I know—I was surprised, too. Allow me to explain.

While chatting with a friend of mine, we began to reminisce about things long-vanished into those mists of time we like to call “progress.” Our conversation ranged from rotary-dial telephones, to furniture-sized TV sets sporting twenty-one-inch screens, to unfettered smoking pretty much everywhere you weren’t liable to blow yourself to kingdom come. (It still amazes me there are “No Smoking” signs on gas pumps. Really? People have to be told that?)

The idea of smoking in public spaces seems especially odd to me now. It’s been years since we set smokers adrift on an ice floe, figuratively speaking. Not that I’m complaining, but I’d almost forgotten what it was like to encounter those little disposable gold foil ashtrays on every table at McDonald’s. When I was a kid, the inside of the restaurant smelled like a casino—with a blue haze hovering just below the tar-stained acoustic ceiling tiles, like some sort of nicotine inversion layer.

One time, I remember watching this guy in the front window of George & Nick’s Pizza on the Centerville city square, expertly spinning one of those impossibly large circles of dough through the air—a Camel dangling precariously from his bottom lip—while another guy working the grill took a drag from his Kool as he flipped the steaks over. It’s just how it was back then. We never gave it a second thought.

Anyway, during the course of our meandering conversation, my mind pulled out a dusty mental photograph of our milkman. My friend is almost as old as me, but he’s originally from a big east coast metropolis, so I had to explain it to him.

When I was a boy growing up on the farm in Iowa, the milkman came to our house once a week. At least I think it was once a week, but it’s been more than fifty years now, so my memory is a little vague on that point. He worked for Anderson Erickson Dairy—known as “AE” to us locals.

When Dad built our home in 1972, one feature he included next to the back porch was a two-by-two concrete pad upon which he placed our “milk box.” This was a small metal box with a hinged lid on top—thinly insulated to retain the cold.

When the milkman stopped at our house, he’d come bounding up the sidewalk to the milk box, lift the lid, and retrieve the order form Mom had left for him—indicating what she needed for the week. One could purchase all manner of dairy products as I recall. Milk, sour cream, cottage cheese, you name it. I don’t remember all the things Mom typically bought, but a couple of gallons of milk was always at the top of the list.

He would then trudge back to his refrigerated truck—painted pale yellow with “Anderson Erickson” in big red letters on the side—retrieve the requested items, and place them in the box. I still have memories of being awakened early in the morning by the sound of the lid clunking shut as he delivered our order.

“Ooo!” I’d think to myself. “I wonder if Mom got the chocolate milk I asked for?”

As I recounted this story to my friend, I had a sudden flash of the old milk jugs that AE used to deliver in the early 70s. They were made of thick glass rather than plastic—and weighed a ton. Each week the milkman would collect the empties and return them to the dairy for cleaning and re-use.

At some point—probably around the same time we didn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore—the glass jugs disappeared, replaced by new-fangled plastic ones. Mom preferred them because they were much lighter, and you didn’t have to fool around with rinsing and returning them.

As I grew into my teens, eventually the milkman quit coming—and one day the milk box just . . . wasn’t there anymore.

Huh. I wonder when that happened?

*

Now that I’m approaching my seventh decade, I think more and more about things like this as well—the way things used to be, but no longer are. I can’t seem to remember exactly when or why they went away—like the little ritual my father and I used to share.

For many years he taught at a local community college and would leave every morning at 7:30 a.m. sharp, attired in a crisp white dress shirt, with rep tie and freshly polished black Oxfords. As I was finishing my morning cocoa, he would call out to say goodbye.

I’d be in my onesie PJs—the kind with the little plastic-soled feet—scampering across the linoleum to the back door where he stood waiting for me. He’d crouch down so I could give him a kiss.

I can still feel the slight roughness of his freshly-shaved cheek and smell the English Leather aftershave he always wore. As I did this, he would reach out and “magically” pull a penny from behind my ear. This little trick wowed me every time.

Then he’d give me a hug, and I’d go tearing off to my room to deposit my latest treasure in a big yellow ceramic piggy bank that sat on my nightstand.

For years, Dad was as constant in his morning routine with me as the milkman was in his appointed rounds. And, like the milkman, one day . . . he just stopped.

I’m sure it was a mutual thing. At some point, I must have lost interest, decided I was “too grown up” to engage in such childish things, or maybe the piggybank was just full. Who knows?

It’s only now that I realize there came a morning when I kissed my father goodbye, he magically retrieved another penny from behind my ear—and it was for the last time.

How could I have missed that?

I suppose, like most young boys, I always believed in Dad’s magic. He could excite wonder in me in a way no one else could, and always knew how to encourage my exploration of the world a bit further.

When I was in second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Eagan, decided for some reason to give me a copy of The Golden Book of Astronomy. I’d never heard of “astronomy” before, but I was hooked immediately. I pored over the pages night after night—looking at the pictures, reading about the moon, planets, stars, and galaxies—long after everyone else in the house was asleep.

Later that spring, Dad decided to order a large telescope from the Sears catalog to further encourage my interest. As the summer approached and I finished second grade, he took me into the front yard one night and set the contraption up.

As it turns out, this was a prime spot for stargazing. The light from the mercury vapor lamp fixed to the power pole in the back yard was neatly blocked by the profile of our house, so it was always in near-total darkness.

On this particular evening, the moon was close to full, and the yard was bathed in its ghostly light. I watched as Dad carefully aimed the telescope—first by looking through the finder scope, and then the eyepiece—working the focus controls slowly back and forth.

Finally, he pulled away.

“Here,” he said. “Have a look at this.”

I scooted up to the eyepiece and squinted through the lens. Suddenly, the moon’s surface came into view. I could see the ridges and craters in exquisite detail, as if I was hovering just above the dark gray regolith.

“Wow!” I exclaimed. “That is so cool!”

I continued to look for a moment, then noticed it gradually creeping out of view.

“Hey! I can’t see it now. It’s moving.”

“Well, sure. Just like the Earth, the moon’s moving, too. You’ll have to keep turning the telescope to follow it.”

He showed me the knobs on the telescope base that did this, and I resumed tracking it, utterly entranced by everything I saw. Later, we aimed it at Jupiter, and caught the pinpoints of light that represented the four Galilean satellites: Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede.

As the summer passed, we spent every night we could in the front yard, staring at the heavens. I recall once the two of us sitting on a blanket placed next to the telescope, just looking up at the sky, taking in the brilliant canopy of stars overhead.

If you enjoy stargazing, one of the advantages of living in rural Iowa is the relative absence of modern light pollution. To this day, the front yard of my boyhood home is the only place where I’ve clearly seen the enormous band of stars overhead that is our Milky Way galaxy. I later learned it’s actually only one of the minor arms—the Orion arm—a cosmic backwater we call home.

As I sat next to Dad, I began counting the stars, determined to see how many there were. He just chuckled and let me go on until I finally gave up at around five hundred.

“There’s so many of them!” I exclaimed.

“More than you can count, that’s for sure. Astronomers say there’s at least a hundred billion, and probably a lot more—and that’s just in our galaxy.”

“There’s more galaxies?” I replied incredulously.

“Lots more, kiddo,” Dad chuckled. “Lots more.”

I remember later that summer, lying by myself on the blanket, feeling the vaguely itchy scratch of the grass through the fabric. From an open window came the distant sound of my father’s laughter as he watched The Johnny Carson Show.

I stared up at the Milky Way, trying to picture all the planets that surely must exist in this vast sea of stars overhead. I imagined myself traveling to one someday, like Luke Skywalker in that movie I’d just seen at the theater. Dad had taken me to the Majestic in Centerville for my third viewing before he finally put his foot down and said no more for a while.

Party pooper.

*

As I grew older, the telescope was eventually relegated to the basement storage room. I’d drag it out every so often and fool around with it for a bit, but once I’d gotten into junior high, I was branded a “nerd” by my classmates, so it seemed best to put away what I decided were nerdy things.

“No sense in giving them any more ammo,” I thought. The sweater vests and suede loafers were more than enough.

The years passed and, while I was in college, my parents were divorced. Dad, of course, took the telescope with him. It was later left in another basement storage room, this time in the home that he and my stepmother shared.

That was the last place I ever saw it. I never knew what became of it after that.

My father died several years ago, and the house he and my stepmother lived in has since passed to new owners. I sure hope that telescope found a good home. She was a beauty, I have to say.

Thinking of it now reminds me how much I still miss my father sometimes. Not in any maudlin, grief-stricken way, to be sure.

But I do miss him. I suppose I always will.

Sometimes, late at night as I lie in bed, my thoughts drift to memories that deepen into dreams—dreams of warm summer nights in Iowa.

I’m lying on a blanket next to my father once again, under the Milky Way.

Counting all the stars in the sky.