There were those days when the Planetarium seemed like all that heaven would allow. It was the only time in a school year full of half-assed exercises and dull books that you could be with your compatriots in rapt silence, awed by the great swilveling machine, lifted into cosmic consideration, and not have to plod through some dull exercise or dodge the cruelties of the "play"ground.

Even the ENTRANCE TRANSITION was majesetic: You'd walk up the pitch-dark walkway and pass through the searing red laser line that counted occupants, into those deep, cradling, leather chairs and quickly be alone in your knowledge of My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nice Peanuts (or Pistachio Nuts, depending on the epoch), you'd be exalted in your neophyte's calculation of the planets' elliptical motion, your reckoning with the enormity of emptiness from our sun's outermost planet to the next nearest star; you were made tiny, philosophically insignificant, by the orders of magnitude that separated all your earthly perception from even one small corner of this galaxy—but you were made huge, elated, by the near grasp of so many billions of stars, the ability, if nothing else, to witness this vastness of vastnesses, and the privilege to contemplate.

There were those days.