“Ring-a-round the rosie … “
The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn won’t be this visually stunning until the 2080s, when Jodi and I will both be long dead. The skies are clear over North Texas, and we resolve to take out our telescope and setup in a nearby park to view the two planets together at the same time. Sunday night will be a dry run. Monday night will be the real deal, when the two Jovian planets will be just 0.06 degrees apart in the southwestern sky.
It’s Sunday. We pull the telescope from the closet. This was my Christmas present about two years ago, and it is wonderful: an automated Celestron reflecting telescope.
It’s housed in three pieces. The telescope optics – the “tube” – lives in its own heavy-duty wheeled crate. The attachments, lenses, and other assorted astronomy knick-knacks are stored in a large plastic tub. The tripod is its own separate beast.
The sun has set when we pull all of this equipment down the street to a local city park. We setup just off a walking trail through the park, assembling the tripod and its supports, mounting the tube on the stand, and then attaching star-tracking and auto-guidance accessories. We hear a voice behind us. “Can I have a look?”
We knew this would happen. Telescopes in public places attract attention. The lure of the stars is too much for people. It’s one thing to gaze at them with unaided eyes; it’s another thing entirely to peep through the eyepiece and have the universe brought to the tip of your nose. The woman who asked the questions is out for an evening walk. She is supported by a walker. She is maskless.
We didn’t bring masks that evening. We suspected this would happen but we counted on people remembering the following things:
- This is a pandemic.
- The vaccine is not widespread.
- Social distancing – I stay away from you and you stay away from me – is still the best preventative in the toolkit.
But the lure of the stars was too much. We declined her request, noting that we don’t have masks and she doesn’t have a mask. Worse, we didn’t want everybody to come up and breathe on our scope while looking through the eyepiece, though we didn’t say this out loud. We had planned on a camera to be mounted on the eyepiece, feeding a video stream on a laptop, which can then be viewed safely from a distance. The camera had not worked before we got out the telescope that evening, and we could not offer a video view.
She asked if we would be back the next night, at around that same time. We said we would, and that we’d have a camera and a screen to make viewing easier from a distance. She continued her walk.
We marveled at Saturn and Jupiter through the eyepiece.
… A pocket full of posies …
Several weeks ago, on a run, I passed behind a row of houses. I heard children playing in a back yard. There was singing.
They were singing “Ring-a-round the rosie.”
I shuddered a little.
Growing up, I was taught that the background to this children’s song was the context of the Black Plague in the 1600s. The “rosie” describes the appearance of one symptom of the Great Plague. Posies were kept to ward off infection. “Ashes, ashes,” refers to the burning of corpses. “We all fall down” … well, that is self-explanatory.
At the time of my run, it was November of the 2020 great plague. Almost 300,000 people have died in the U.S. alone. In a back yard in Texas, children were laughing and singing a song of the Black Plague.
Or were they? This song is, in many ways, a perfect song for 2020 … not because of its alleged origins in the Great Plague in the 1600s, but because most folklore scholars reject that particular explanation of the origin of the song. It was only in the mid-1900s that this explanation arose, and it was tied to the version of the song more common to the U.S. and not the versions of the song that date back much earlier to Europe, and especially to the UK. In fact, this plague-based origin story for the song is likely wrong … a myth that has been popular for over 50 years, but one with no basis in fact.
An explanation with no basis in fact? That is a perfect thing for 2020. We have a president who lies every day to the American people, and not just little politician fibs or spins, but real whoppers of lies … great, corn-fed beasts of lies. George Orwell might view the evil forces in his novel, “1984,” as nothing but goofy cartoon villains when compared to the braggadocio, egotism, and prevarication vomited in 280 characters or less daily on the American people by the elected chief executive.
That the song, “Ring-a-around the Rosie ,” has origins in the Great Plague is as believable as the 2020 claim that a U.S. election was stolen. Honestly, it’s the perfect lie to cap off 2020 … the tiny fecal sprinkles on the shit cake that has been this year.
Which brings us to Monday night.
The park was already buzzing with socially distanced people waiting to get a look at the Great Conjunction when we started setting up the telescope. We claimed the same spot as the night before, in the hopes of attracting the pedestrian with the walker.
She never turned up.
But many other people could not stay away from us.
As we were mounting the camera and getting ready to try to focus it on the Moon and start streaming live video on the internet for friends and family, a man came bounding up to us. He had been sitting on a bench about 50 feet away. He wanted to share a picture with us that he had taken. He was mask-less.
We had masks this time, but they were still in our pockets. We assumed people would not bother us until we were setup and actually aiming at the Great Conjunction. We were wrong. People just cannot stay away from a telescope, even one that is pointing in the wrong direction.
Worse, they were not wearing masks. They didn’t even produce them to put them on. Few people that evening would put on a mask besides us. Masks are the posies in our pockets, a bit of cloth to ward off the virus. My mask keeps you safe, your mask keeps me safe. Few people that night were interested in keeping Jodi and me safe.
“Can you please keep your distance?” I said to the man as he got to within 10 feet of us.
He kept coming.
“SIR. You are not wearing a mask. KEEP YOUR DISTANCE,” I growled.
He stopped (finally). Jodi and I got our masks on. He never put one on. Jodi humored him by looking at the photo on his phone. Eventually, we got him to go away when we said we were setting up a video stream and he could come look at that when it was ready.
We got the camera focused on the Moon. We slewed over toward the Great Conjunction. After aligning the telescope at the end of the slew and adjusting the focus, we had a view of the Great Conjunction. We started live streaming on Facebook (YouTube just wouldn’t get going, so we dumped that idea and went to Facebook, which worked fine). Jodi invited the bounding man and his family over to look at the laptop screen from a safe distance. That seemed to smooth out my growling from earlier. They went away satisfied.
Other people came over during our viewing. They kept their distance and looked at the laptop screen. We remained masked for most of the evening.
… Ashes, ashes …
Collin County, TX, is on fire with the COVID-19 pandemic right now. Yesterday we had over 1200 cases in one day, a single-day record (excluding days when big historical dumps of cases spiked our one-day numbers). Just about 100 of these were “probable,” while the rest were all “confirmed.” We’ve steadily seen about 1000 cases per day for several days, and this is the end of a long and steady rise in case counts. The test positivity rate is somewhere in the range of 15-25%.
It’s horrifying. Something like 6 people per day are dying from the disease, and we are only now beginning to see the “Thanksgiving surge” caused by too much travel and socializing over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. The surge we are seeing is just in case counts; deaths have not yet caught up to that.
Christmas is tomorrow, and people are again traveling too much.
Most of the people out in that park on Monday night did not have masks. It’s a testament to the lackadaisical attitude in our county that has fueled the forest fire of infection now raging. People just don’t take the pandemic seriously, and it shows.
