Journal Entry for March 2nd
On the Halo
It’s still up there. And we still don’t know what it is, or where it came from, or what it means. It hasn’t grown, which I guess is good, but there’s no sign that it will go away either.
The theories people are putting out on the news are getting more ridiculous by the day. Most of it is still grounded in rudimentary, if scientifically dubious, astronomy and meteorology. No one has crossed the threshold into aliens yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
David would have thought it was a message from God. I like to think I would not have fought him on that, but I probably would have. He was a wonderful husband in many ways, but his intractable reliance on explaining all unknowns as Acts of God drove me mad. I can hear his voice in my head, even now, delivering a preachy decree on the halo around the sun.
“God does strange things, mysterious wonders that we cannot, that we should not, hope to comprehend. It is our duty to praise his actions, not question them.” Pompous, devotional rubbish.
Of course, it wouldn’t be much better than what people have already guessed. I spoke to Jeanie on the phone yesterday. Her coworker’s husband works down in DC for the government. According to her co-worker, the husband hinted that the current working theory in DC is that it’s the result of some kind of weather experiment gone wrong. Maybe by the North Koreans, though even for them a technological failure of this size would be pretty big. So maybe it was the Chinese.
Still, even all that feels like a stretch. The halo was unsettling at first, but it doesn’t appear to be doing much of anything. It follows the sun around, from dawn to dusk, and is otherwise innocuous. One thing the scientists on TV have agreed on from the start – nothing’s changed because of the halo. Temperatures are normal, weather patterns are normal, the amount of sun coming through the atmosphere is normal.
So maybe it’s not important to know what it is? Maybe it will just go away and be one of those wonderful mysteries. Or maybe someone, somewhere, knows what it is and they aren’t saying anything because they understand it is not dangerous.
It reminds me of a story from college. There was a strange, prolonged light in the sky at some point in the middle ages, and scientists from all over the world recorded it. Chinese, Middle Eastern, I think some monks in France or Switzerland did as well. They knew some things about astronomy, leftover information from Aristotle and the classical era, and they figured they were watching the birth of a new star. There wasn’t a lot of science then, certainly not any on the level we have today, but enough to guess at what was happening.
I remember the story because, as it turned out, it was a supernova. It was the death of a star, not the birth of one. It was the very opposite of what the time’s most learned minds knew.
So I think of all the scientists and politicians and religious wingbats who’ve been going on TV the last few weeks and telling us this is a sign of the end times, some portent of the global warming bill coming due. Maybe it is. Or maybe it really is nothing but a halo, a strange hoop of light that will go as quickly and unexpectedly as it came without ever having any real effect on us.
Back then, after a few months, the supernova ended. The power of the explosion waned, and observers in the days before high-powered telescopes could no longer see it. It had no effect on earth. It was a good story, something to connect people from parts of the world that had never been connected before. Maybe that’s why the halo is up there. As some celestial accident that can connect, rather than divide.
I probably can’t write tomorrow. We’re doing a baking marathon at Susie’s for the girls’ fundraiser at their school. Maybe the halo will be gone by the next time I put an entry in here.
The Tall Tale Year 