Two Worlds Collide

Johnny just couldn’t believe it. The football coach just informed him that if he didn’t get a better grade in his astronomy class, he wouldn’t be able to suit up on the team. He shuffled home with his head hung low. He hated astronomy. Nothing made sense to him. All this discussion about things flying around somewhere he couldn’t even see was crazy. And then the teacher telling him to remember that his mom serves him noodles. What the heck does that have to do with space? 

His mom greeted him as he let the door slam behind him. 

“Hey there bud! How was your day?” She didn’t notice that he had a sad appearance about him, walking with his shoulders slumped. 

“I hate astronomy”, he muttered. “Nothing makes sense, and I am failing the class!” 

His mom stopped what she was doing and looked his way. “Well, maybe I can have a talk with your teacher”, she offered.

“No mom! That will be embarrassing for me! I just need to figure this out. If I don’t improve, I am OFF the football team!” He sulked to his bedroom and flopped upon his bed. He loved football and if he couldn’t play, there was nothing else!!   He tried to put together the order of the planets in his head, but all he saw spinning around were those stupid Styrofoam balls hanging from the classroom ceiling. They just creeped him out. “UGH” he exclaimed.

He took out his football from his backpack and just started tossing it into the air and catching it. Tossing and catching, tossing, and catching. It grew so monotonous that he fell into a deep fitful sleep. 

All of a sudden, a loud whooshing noise surrounded him, and he popped open his eyes.  Startled, he tried to orient himself in his room. Where the heck was he?? He was on his bed with the brass frame and his Dallas Cowboys blanket, but that was all he recognized. His head was spinning, and he couldn’t focus. Then he realized his head wasn’t spinning. His bed was! He was moving at a great pace that he needed to hold onto the foot of the bed frame. He grabbed two railings and peered through. Flying objects were in his sight. “What in the world?”, he thought. At the same time, he discovered that the bed frame posts moved. The one in his left-hand swiveled left causing his bed to tilt that way. The one on the right went right. “Ok, what is going on?” Johnny asked out loud to no one in particular. “Am I dreaming,” he muttered as he pinched himself.   “Ouch! Guess not, because everything is still the same.”

Just then his bed came in sight of the sun. “Wow! I must be out of my world because that is one big ball of fire,” he thought.  He worked the bed rails so that he didn’t get too close. He could feel the heat and knew better than to get too close. Then he saw a small orb circling the sun. “Oh, that must be a planet. Which one is it” he tried to recollect the names of the planets that were hung above the classroom. Then he remembered that phrase the teacher kept repeating and repeating. My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles. “That’s it!! The order of the planets! Nothing to do with noodles at all!” Johnny laughed out loud and started putting names to the first letters. “M is for Mercury, V is for Venus, E is for Earth, M is for Mars, or is it Mercury?” he had to stop and think about this one. What did the teacher say about Mars and Mercury? “Think Johnny, think!!” Just then the bed past over Earth which he recognized in a second. It appeared just like the globe in his bedroom. Within a few seconds, a red orb appeared. “Mars is red!”, he shouted. “Now I get it! Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn Uranus, and Neptune!” Woohoo!” Johnny was so excited that he almost missed a huge rock heading straight at his bed. He shifted the rails just in the nick of time as the huge rocky formation flew past him.   “What was that? An asteroid or a meteor?” Johnny remembered the meteor shower that his grandpa woke him up for about three years ago. Grandpa said that it is like a bunch of shooting stars falling out of the sky, when it is really meteoroids entering our atmosphere and burning up.   “Well, I just passed over Earth, so that rock didn’t enter the atmosphere of Earth so it must be an asteroid”, Johnny thought confidently. 

The bed continued sailing through space and passed by Jupiter and the amazing Saturn with the rings made of ice and dust surrounding it. All along the way, Johnny was constantly dodging flying debris. He decided that this was a bit like football. He had the ball and had to avoid all the opponents attacking him. Comets that looked like big snowballs zoomed at him. Asteroids of all shapes and sizes constantly came into his sight and he had to zig and zag out of the way. Tilting this way, then that way, he finally found victory in a comfortable spot just floating along.

Johnny began to get chilly, so he pulled his Dallas Cowboy blanket up over him. Whatever was going on was incredible. He lied down and tried to figure out how he ended up outside of his room and world. He hated Astronomy. He knew that. Yet here he was surrounded by all the ins and outs of the subject matter. The noodle thing finally made sense to him. He knew Mars was red and Saturn had rings and Mercury was the smallest. This information was always there. He just was not able to decipher and put it all together before. “I guess having my two worlds collide is helping me,” he thought. “Football and Astronomy! Who would have thought that these two very different environments could come together and work!” 

Now the thought of getting back on Earth was filling Johnny’s head. He wasn’t even sure how he left the planet. He remembered that he was tossing his football up and down right before this all happened. “Where is my ball?” Thought Johnny. He flipped up the blanket. There it was, buried in the depths of the comforter. Just then it started to float up, and Johnny reached and singled handedly caught it and pulled it in to his chest! The bed started to spin and spin! Johnny closed his eyes thinking he was going to get dizzy and fall off into space! A loud clunk filled the air. Johnny warily opened his eyes and saw Earth. Adjusting to the light surrounding him, he realized that the earth he saw was his globe. The wind was gently blowing in through the window and the night sky was filled with twinkling stars. Exhaling and hugging his football he decided to ask his mother to have noodles for dinner.