Free Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science by Dorion Sagan Page B

a very dark girl half his size but twice as fast. She whipped off her two earrings, he whipped off his one, and they started flailing away at each other. This led to him getting kicked out. The white teacher asked me to stay after and wanted to know what I thought of the situation. I asked her if she was asking me because I was the only guy, and she said yes. “But you’re the only white girl in the class,” I said.
    The next day after class, I was jumped by several boys on the steps of the little building past the pool. Phyllis, one of the black girls who knew me from the bleachers, was by the tennis courts and yelled, “Just run, white boy, as fast as you can to the principal’s office. Don’t look back.” I did and identified the kids. For a few days, I stayed away from school, accepting my stepmother’s painkillers, which she had for her back pain and which allowed me to forget about the fact that I’d have to return to school once the bruises and swelling on my face died down. When I returned to school, my tough black friend “Blue” informed me the kids I’d identified got kicked out and that there was a contract out on me. I did not take this seriously, considering it movie bluster inspired by
The Godfather.
    Aside from Blue, my only other friend at the time was Tim, a white boy who was gay and had an older boyfriend who was a professional therapist. One day, Tim and I were in my room listening to my David Bowie albums, whose songs like “Starman” and “Life on Mars” I half-hoped to share with my dad (not so much “Space Oddity,” I explained, which was too popular). My half-brother, Nick, was playing superhero and jumped from the arm of the couch toward Tim, who stepped away. When he hit the floor, my stepmother had enough. She insisted my father speak with me. Soon thereafter, to my smug amusement, he lectured me, giving a rationalist discourse on natural selection as the basis for a normal heterosexual relationship. He underscored the evolutionary uselessness of Eros diverted from its natural goal. Instead of the Old Testament, he was appealing to Charles Darwin to make the same point.
    I was glad he was paying attention to me, even if it was negative attention. The stories of neutron stars a spoonful of which weighed tons, of black hole portals to different places and times, and of higher-dimension objects moving through lower-dimension worlds that he’d told me as a boy he was now sharing with the nameless masses. Why, my unconscious must have wondered, was he spreading his message about contacting life in outer space to millions when I, his firstborn, had been neglected? Was I mere human dust, disposable detritus taken root in the fertile medium of my microbiologist mother, only to be forever after confined to the plutonic outskirts of his emotional universe? At least in Adriatic Italian dialect, as I would learn two years later from my college girlfriend, whose own undivorced parents were bhang-smoking partiers on Cape Cod who welcomed me into their home, there was a name for the dust you swept up—
mundessa.
Ah, to be embraced, named, recognized, even if only momentarily, on the way to the eternal dustbin.
    Dust’s relegation to a trope of dirt and insignificance, entropy and loss, is belied by its astronomical grandeur. And few, if any, have been more eloquent on this grandeur than my father, whose own bones now gather the stuff in sites next to his parents, moved from Florida to accompany him in Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. From Martian dust storms as part of the genesis of his thoughts on how dust and smoke could affect life on Earth, to his study of Triton’s streaks as windblown dust, to his “pale blue dot” speech, perhaps his most beautiful, in which he calls Earth seen from space “a mote of dust,” my father took dust deadly seriously. And he led others to do so. He drew the world’s attention to the role of particulate matter in blocking out light. Extrapolating