The other day I had an appointment with my regular doctor, not the “bone” one. This one’s more important, because bones won’t kill unless they’re cancerous; but when the squishy stuff inside stops working, you’re done for.
While sitting in the private examining room, I looked up and saw Jupiter and Mars. There wasn’t a hole in the roof, it wasn’t after sunset, and I didn’t have an “I-phone” with an astronomy app like my son Jeremy (one night Jeremy and I looked down through the ground to the earth’s opposite side and saw the sun shining in an Australian sky, sort of).
Then “Fly Me to the Moon” came to mind, especially its lyrics “Let me see what Spring is like on Jupiter and Mars” (I capitalize the planets. The late Jimmy Dean even “humanized” them in a sausage commercial).
To borrow from Andy Griffith, “What it was, was” (or in this case) “were” paper simulations of those planets, taped there for the enjoyment (and distraction) of young children while waiting to be seen by the doctor (a 67 year-old “astronomy boy” got a kick out of them too).
The ceiling plaster there looked like tiny stucco-like peaks. Where I lived before, the “heavens” plastered background was circularly swirled, while on my old boyhood bedroom ceiling back on the Old Concord Road, un-plastered boards looked down upon me, like the true supporting framework of the firmament revealed.
Those who have slept with the light on and awaken for an hour or so in the wee hours before finally getting back to sleep will understand and appreciate my “ceiling ruminations.”
Sitting there in the examining room with those planetary images above, I thought of the macro-universe’s workings extending out billions of light years all around, versus the workings of my own micro-universe extending from my heart out to my skin (including my brain, too).
It’s not conceit, just human nature. To quote a song from the Broadway production of “The Sound of Music, “Every star and every whirling planet, and every constellation in the sky, revolves about the center of the universe, and it’s a great big “I,” and there’s no way to stop it…”
In one antiquated model of the universe, there were concentric levels of creation. Viewing your physical self as the universe’s center, your hollow bronchi seem even deeper down than the great subterranean hollows of Carlsbad, itself!
From my examination, I learned that my temperature was where it usually is, about 98.4, normal for me. My own little micro-universe isn’t cooling off like the macro-universe, although long, long before the macro-universe reaches absolute zero, the “Mackro-universe” will be there (as I’ve said before, I am nothing if not analogy, and a little word-play).
Just now, thoughts of planets and stars swirling in space are joined by thoughts of my platelets and corpuscles swirling in their own “sanguine” ether.
My body-mass index is good. BMI makes me think of specific gravity, the amount of water something displaces when submerged. If my BMI were as low as Saturn’s specific gravity (like pumice), I could have floated around in the quarry hole all day, but would have followed my Granite Quarry School, 6th-grade teacher Roselyn Misenheimer’s admonition to never dive in.
In this analogy of physical me and the universe, I must close with “extremities.” Just as the universe has “outer reaches,” so do I, in the form of fingers, toes and their respective “nails,” truly the extent of my own personal, physical universe.
The universe has always been an unfettered space, free to stretch its “fingers” and “toes,” especially its toes into an ever-expanding space without danger of “cramping,” “crossing,” or “ingrowing.”
There, my analogy ends sadly, as I receive a “reminder” phone text from the next doctor I’m to see: the podiatrist.