Vertrees: Plenty to see here on Earth, no matter what time

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Carrol Vertrees

Updated: December 7, 2011 8:09AM

Here we go again, tinkering with our clocks, but out there in the world of stars and other stuff, it won’t make any difference. It means, though, that I must rise an hour earlier if I want to watch daylight chase out the darkness. An hour earlier by our clocks, I mean. I think that’s what I mean.

The sun comes up east of Valparaiso. I can count on it. Scientists say the sun is about 4.5 billion years old, and I wonder if it is showing its age. It ought to be old enough to retire, but I hope it doesn’t while I am around.

We welcome sunrise, but it seems funny to me that the sun just sits up there, not moving, while we earthlings ride around looking for it. Sometimes we see it, and sometimes we don’t, but it is always there, anchored in the sky, wherever that is.

I read the other day that Pluto has been downgraded and is no longer a planet, as if that makes any difference in the grand plan. It is still out there, though, part of a starry universe.

Changing our clocks is an amusing exercise. Back on the farm, we thought it was a strange procedure. My rural grandfather put it plainly: “Them cows don’t give a dang about clocks. They know when it is milking time.”

It apparently makes sense to politicians and businesses. Cows don’t count.

Watching the slow but sure change from dark to daylight is reassuring. In my memory, I can hear the roosters crowing, a rural alarm as reliable and certain as any alarm clock. Not fast or slow time, but rooster time.

Nobody has counted the stars, but some educated estimates reach into the billions. I wonder how they got there.

Even stars don’t live forever, but I am not sure what kills them off. Maybe they just get tired and turn out their lights. Experts tell us that some of the stars that are blinking at us have been dead for years. Their obits have not reached us from light years away, apparently. I hope there is no danger of stars becoming extinct, because the sky would look funny without them. We surely would miss the sun.

I was a klutz in astronomy class back in my scholastically unremarkable college days. Smarter kids and smarter adults say they can see the outlines of clusters like the bears, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. And Orion and the Pliades. If those patterns are really there, was it planned that way?

The great Milky Way is outlined up there in the sky, too, I am told. My eyes don’t see it. I may as well be looking for a Snickers bar, which I like better. Mars is out there somewhere, proud to have its name on a candy bar.

I should return to the great planetarium setup in Merrillville’s Pierce School, where some of the mystery turns into comforting, reassuring facts about the big world there in the sky.

A 3-year-old helped unlock some of the wonder when she asked her aunt: “When we are dead and gone, will you love me then? Does love go on?”

The answer she got was this: “See how the stars shine and glow. Some of them died a long time ago. Still they shine. Love, like starlight, never dies.”

That truth won’t die and neither will my memory of the faint sound of our roosters on the farm, telling us to wake up and see the world.