For The Moon Never Beams Without Bringing Me Dreams

In honor of this eclipse tomorrow that I would not have known about if not for Facebook - I shall tell you a story about my first job.

No, that's not a complete non sequitur. Keep reading.

When people ask me what my first job was, I know they're expecting to hear about babysitting, or dog walking, or waitressing. Truth is, I didn't actually do any of those things until I was 17 or 18, except for dog walking, and I didn't get paid for that. The story that I always tell people is about how Mom let me set up a little lemonade stand outside our front garden - which was more profitable than it sounds, because a) I live in England and virtually nobody knows what real lemonade is (our idea of lemonade is lemon soda made by Schweppes) so they were willing to pay a pretty penny for it; and b) I then moved onto selling home-made cookies, fudge, cake, flapjacks, pavlova, truffles, marzipan and anything else I could translate out of my Spanish kids' cookbooks (SO much better than English ones) as well as apples and plums and rhubarb and various vegetables from the garden. I won't say I made a packet, but I made what seemed like a packet to a kid. At least as long as Mom stayed inside. When she came out she always started giving people everything for free. *rolls eyes*

Even at six and seven I had a better head for business than my soft-hearted mom. I blame / thank Daddy for teaching me Monopoly as soon as I was able to talk.

Anyway, I digress. I tell the lemonade-stand story, because - well, it is technically correct. My first job working for someone else, however, was much less profitable and much more odd. At the age of fifteen, through a series of seemingly-incomprehensible events, I found myself working at the local university - University of Hertfordshire - under the grand title of Research Assistant. Although I didn't actually assist in research much at all - mostly I carried things, and copied down data, and helped develop a computer program for collating findings from labs around the world. I'm fairly sure the important title was just to make a geeky teenage girl feel important. Whatever. I ran with it.

What department did I supposedly assist in research for? Astronomy and Astrophysics, of course.

My love affair with the skies started when I was four or five. We lived in Spain when I was a kid, and somewhere between my fourth and fifth birthdays - at least that's when I think it was - we moved in with John, a boyfriend of my mom's. John worked in the yachting business, I believe designing yachts, but he was also a retired sailor who'd sailed around the world, and he taught me a whole wealth of things, including how to navigate by the constellations. Perhaps your average four or five-year-old couldn't memorise star charts for the Northern Hemisphere, or keep track of the phases of the moon and the tides, but you have to remember that I was born with an off-the-charts IQ and a thirst for knowledge. By the time I started school I could easily recognise Orion or Cepheus or Cassiopeia or Hercules or any of fifteen or twenty others. Moving back to England was hard for so many reasons, but the skies were one of the things I really missed. Even in a town the size of St Albans, where at least you can still SEE the stars (unlike parts of London), the light pollution makes it a vastly different experience from viewing them from a small island in the Mediterranean where the biggest town was a couple thousand people, and the air was dry.

I guess I kind of forgot how much I loved everything night-sky-related, until I met Julian when I was 12 or 13. Julian was a creature of the night, and he rekindled my love for it. In summers we would drive out to the country and stare through binoculars for hours. He built me a telescope for looking at the moon. He bought me books. One day he brought a huge package of those tiny glow-in-the-dark stars and we spent an entire weekend sketching out a map (an inaccurate one! LOL) on my bedroom ceiling, some of which still remains to this day. My parents didn't know about Julian, but they approved of me showing an interest in something that wasn't medicine, so they bought me more books. And I read, and started educating myself on the technical side of things, and learned, and loved.

And then Sir Patrick Moore came to town to give a lecture at the Alban Arena, and I knew I had to go. So Mom got us tickets. I must have been fourteen, maybe fifteen. And he's signing programmes in the hall afterwards, and Mom goes and chats to him, and is her natural charming, slightly flirty self - charming people comes as naturally to my mother as breathing, always has done - and hands him a letter, which is about me, and how much I love astronomy, and want to work in the field when I'm older. Plus all those other things like how smart and amazing I am - the stuff most moms like to tell anyone who'll listen. *grins*

And a couple of weeks later, I pick up the phone at home, and this very dry, very proper voice says to me, "Am I speaking with Miss Sandy Frost? This is Patrick Moore."

Oh. My. Gosh.

The long and short of it was that he found me a work placement. He talked to an old friend of his at the University of Herts, who I believe was the head of the Astro Dept - Professor Kitchen? - and they offered me a placement. Just because I wanted one, and they thought I was smart.

It never fails to amaze me how nice people can be.

So I went to work. Year 10s in this country have to do a two-week work study placement anyway, and usually the school arranges places with shops and nursery schools and offices that the students have to bid on, but they were happy that I'd arranged my own. (Or that fate and a gentleman's kindness had done it for me.) I went to work at the uni for two weeks to start. Professor Kitchen placed me with Dr Collett, and Dr Collett passed me onto Dr Tanvir, and Dr Tanvir liked me and decided to keep me. I can't even remember the amount of projects I worked on that summer. They taught me how to write computer code, and set me to work developing a program that linked to all the observatories around the world. They had me assisting post-grad students with their projects. The one I remember the best was with an astrogeologist who was investigating the volcanoes on Io (one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter; the fiery one) in the hopes of discovering whether Io or Europa (icy crust with probable ocean beneath) could be potential harbors for extraterrestrial bacteria. They taught me physics, and how to use a mass spectrometer to read age and distance, and they took me to the building site of the new university observatory. They encouraged me to study different specialties, and I knew within a couple of weeks that I wanted to study the formation of nebulae.

We had a total solar eclipse that summer, the first visible in the UK since the 1920s, and I got to watch it with some of the best scientific minds in the field.

It was the most glorious summer. I felt like I'd found a niche for myself, like I'd discovered that missing piece of my life. I even managed to wrangle myself an invitation to go to the Teide National Park in Tenerife - a place I'd been a couple years before, and fallen in love with - which is considered the closest thing on Earth to the surface of Mars, and is where all kinds of experiments are run. (Don't ask me what kind. I never got there.)

I wished that I could have stayed on staff there forever, because I was SO ready to be done with high school. But I had another year to go. And then Julian died. And I shoved myself into earthly things and never went back to studying the universe. Julian WAS the nighttime; he was the moon and the stars and all the secrets to life, and without him I didn't want to care about any of it. After a while I just kind of forgot. It was easier.

Will I ever go back? Will I ever study again, go to uni, perhaps do a degree? Probably not. Even if I wanted to, I'm not sure that I CAN. Since the brain damage, I don't learn easily - not only am I no longer a child genius, I'm not even sure that I'm smart enough to grasp the basic physics that I would need to know. And most of the time I can live with that. But just occasionally, just once in a blue moon - or perhaps less often - I feel them calling my name, calling, calling, calling me home, and underneath that siren song is the promise of knowledge, of all the secrets of the universe being open to me.

[True story or smoke and mirrors? You'll never know. :)

In any case, I hope you enjoyed my tale. Now go enjoy your eclipse, and spare a thought for this girl who wishes she was there with you.]