Inside the Dome

It’s long into the night before it gets dark. The blue sky seemingly evaporates revealing the cosmos. Hanging high above a giant oak tree sits the Earth’s glowing satellite. In it’s near fullness it reflects back it’s counterpart the sun, fusing and exploding daylight from the other side. A young girl peers through her new telescope pointed at the mysterious glowing orb, her face squished against the long cylinder with one eye covered by her hand and the other full and deep brown, accepting the light that shines through revealing the cratered surface of the moon. 

“Do you see the craters?” her father who has crouched next to her asks. 

“It's so pretty,” she says. 

The little girl pulls her face from the lens and looks straight up at the pinpricks in black, “Can I see the queen?” 

“Cassiopeia,” her father says. He stands and looks up, “yes, but not in the telescope.” 

“Why?” 

“Well, for one she’s a constellation. A constellation is made up of many stars. And each one is so far away that if you were to try and focus on one it wouldn’t look much different than they do right now.”

He looks up. Ursa Major floats overhead and Orion stands frozen in battle with Taurus. “It's like a picture in the sky and it's best to use your eyes,” he says. “Your eyes have plenty enough focusing power to see her.”

“There. There she is,” he says pointing. 

The small city of Cloverdale in Northern California is about eighty-five miles north of San Francisco, and sits within the american viticultural area known as the Alexander Valley. It is the most northerly city of Sonoma County and where the family of three moved after uprooting from Sacramento almost three years ago. The two places couldn’t be more different. Their house on 25th and J in Sac was much smaller and louder than their home in Cloverdale. In Sacramento Chris was in close walking distance to a tiki bar called the Jungle Bird where he frequented more often than he should. But now the closest bar was at least a twenty minute walk and he found that sitting in his own backyard by the pool with a cocktail was much more satisfying. 

It had since become their weekend tradition to walk the twenty-five minutes downtown to The Trading Post for brunch. It was a newer restaurant, a farm to table variety and this morning they are seated at a long wooden table that separates patrons by subtle flower arrangements. 

“What are you going to have today, Star Gazer?” Claire says, smiling at her daughter Eve. 

Her father looks up and down the menu and tries to find a good reason why he should have an IPA at ten in the morning. He reads the tap list and when the waitress, a young woman with the most beautiful hands asks what he would like to drink, his eyes focus on her manicure and the softness of her tan skin and the little silver ring around her pinky. 

“I’ll have a coffee for now, thank you.” 

When the food comes Eve pouts about all the “red and green things” in her food. 

“Those are tomatoes,” Chris says, annoyed and poking one with his fork and putting it into his mouth. 

“And that is spinach,” he says scooping up some of the greens and placing it against his tongue. 

“I don’t like tomatoes and spinach,” Eve whines. 

The waitress with beautiful hands walks by and Chris in a moment of impulse fueled by a tick in his anger stops her and, “can I get a Pliny the Elder IPA please?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

Claire looks at him and says, “a bit early don’t you think?” 

“Not early enough,” is his reply.

             Downtown Cloverdale is made up of small shops and restaurants with such staples as Papa’s Pizza, Moe’s Eagles Nest deli, The Hacienda, and the movie theater. A new saloon had opened recently called The Saw Mill and when you went inside it felt like stepping into a western. It was Chris’s favorite bar to frequent other than Dante’s, another staple. And he often found himself there against Claire’s will on any given night of the week, taking his longboard to shorten the time it would take to lean against that horseshoe bar with all those people who didn’t look like him. 

“You’re so short tempered sometimes, I hate it,” Claire commented after he made his daughter cry when she dropped her drink from the Plank Coffee shop onto the pavement. This was the next destination on the list on their weekend routine. A lovely little coffee house with delicious pastries and well made drinks. In the three years that had passed they’d become silent regulars. The little family who were there on the same day at roughly the same time but who never spoke to anyone or revealed anything about themselves. 

The spilled drink ran into the gutter and Chris regained his composure and his anger was replaced by guilt. Why did he so often react in anger? His daughter needed support in that moment, not frustration, she was a little girl afterall. He went back inside the coffee shop and ordered her another. When he came outside Claire was holding Eve in her arms seated at a table. 

“Here you go, baby,” he said and handed Eve her drink. 

“What do you say?” Claire said. 

Growing up Chris never had much of a relationship with his father. Most of his memories were of the pain in seeing him leaving. His father always seemed to be somewhere new. Chris would receive a postcard with the story of a new woman in a new city of ever growing distance from him. And when his father would show up to take Chris for the day, the experience was tainted with the knowledge that it would end and he would again be watching his father pulling away on the street in his beige 57’ Thunderbird.

Chris worried that he was an inadequate father. I’m here though aren’t I? He would say to himself. That must count for something. I’m present--and here. When Eve was a baby he had found it easier to be a father, she didn’t speak back to him and she was merely a little chubby ball of human flesh. He would occasionally find himself so wrapped up in the moment while he rocked her to sleep that he would begin crying at the sheer intensity of the moment. It was like his future self was given the opportunity to go back to a random point in time with his daughter as an infant, where each passing second would be allowed to be felt one more time. That period was also at the tailend of his days of heavy drinking. I never dropped her! There was that one time, when I almost did… He eventually began to grow out of his bad habits, the years of the “roaring twenties,” as he called them, which were followed by the years of the “great depression” of his thirties. 

On his 31st birthday while in an alcohol fueled stupor arguing with Claire he had lost his temper and smashed a hole in the wall at their home on 25th and J. He was holding Eve at the time and when she began to cry and Claire took her from him he didn’t resist. He left and walked to the Jungle Bird. After that he began to work on his drinking. He even looked for a new job and thought about his future for what felt like the first time in his life. He had searched for employment paths that might promise actual meaning to his life but his resume was full of “warehouse technician,” and “forklift certified,” and so his job searches yielded no call backs other than other warehouses. 

“Daddy,” Eve said, tugging at his shirt as they began to walk home from the coffee shop. 

“Yes?” 

Eve grabbed his hand and squeezed it sucking at the straw and the cold vanilla contents inside. 

“Can we look at the stars later? I mean when it gets dark?”

“Of course we can.” 

“Can you hold mommy's hand too?” she asked, tugging at Claire's wrist. 

“Of course.” 

He frequently had to remind himself that he was not his father. And although he recognized parts of himself that were very much his mother, he was not equal to the sum of the two. He was himself and he could make his own decisions about who he could be. He had been fairly good at making bad decisions throughout his life but he had been lucky. He was fortunate enough to be able to see through the fog when it was getting thick and find a way to right his course. He had been able to develop a bond with his daughter over talk of the solar system and the moon cycles. And when he would stand out in the backyard and look up he could see that his troubles were no different than anyone else's. His story was not unique and this thought brought him comfort.

It was near nine o’clock at night when the sky darkened enough to see the moons of Jupiter. It was always a cosmic treat getting a bead on the gas giant, and even though the small telescope wasn’t very powerful it was strong enough to make out the moons that accompanied the giant. 

“Pretty amazing isn’t it?” Chris said to his daughter. 

“Could we go there? Like in a spaceship?” 

“It's pretty far away, but I suppose one could. Do you think you want to be an astronaut?” 

“Yeah, I think I’d like to do that. I want to go to the moon too.”

Looking up at that great sphere of star pricks and dark it was easy to forget about one’s troubles. The errors in one’s being, the faults and failures. How many people across the world were looking up at the inside of the dome of the universe? The differing constellations moving and shifting above the tiny insignificant planet full of worry and the enduring spirit that had grown the species from near impossibility. The dreams of human beings striving toward the futility of perfection and sustainability.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in aliens?” 

“I don’t know.”

“I do.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“What makes you think they are out there?”

“I don’t know. I just think we aren’t alone.” 

“I think you’re right about that, baby. I don’t think we are alone either.”