halley's comet and a luminous trail of sentimentality

I remember my dad waking me in the early hours of the morning, and with stern prodding and despite my several determined attempts to fall back asleep he suceeded in getting me out of bed. It was 1986 and we were driving down an unsealed road in our '76 Holden Torana, binoculars on the passenger seat and my siblings and I in the back. I was six years old. We were to witness the comet that Edmond Halley had named and had last visited this bright blue globe in 1910 and wouldn't be back for another 76 years or so for its fifth flyby since Halley had spied it through his telescope. By all projections I'd be lucky to see it again.

My father has been dead now for about 15 years and like many father-son relationships it was a distant one. My father was an academic who spent most of his time in his room slash study and many of my memories about him involve a kiss to a face covered in stubble, as I had quietly interrupted him and his work to say 'night'. Someone recently told me that the love of a father is different to that of a mother but that it could nonetheless be found beneath all the anger, derision and disappointment aimed at his fat sad son. And then sometimes I think maybe Freud was right.

You know I even thought about telling him? It was less than a year before heart failure threw him to the ground. I was eleven and my grandmother was staying with us and in need to accommodate the Empress Dowager in our modest homestead my father and I were sleeping in a caravan we'd hired and parked in our driveway. I think it was really my brother who was supposed to sleep there instead but there had been an argument and a fight, with my father and brother falling into each other so clumsily and my mother screaming for them to stop... well perhaps this is why my father was sleeping out in the caravan and not in the house.

I was in bed and reading when my father came in. The book was about some ecologists fighting poachers in deep dark Africa, sort of a dumbed down 'Gorillas in the Mist' for children where justice and universal good sense prevail. Instead of the murdered researchers bodies being found their heads split by Hutu extremists who would go onto pile the land and rivers of Rwanda high with the bodies of their Tutsi neighbours.

I lay there nervously with the words sitting on my tongue but I said nothing, either because I was scared of how he would react or simply incapable of fully articulating my feelings at that age, I don't remember. But the lights went out in silence and I fell into sleep.

We left the car in a gravelled car park and made our way to the oval. The air was that kind of frigid that sets your skin taught so as to remind you of the boundaries of your self and the outside atmosphere and we stood still and looked up into the universe above and to be honest, even with the assistance of the binoculars I don't remember seeing very much at all; unable to tell the comet from the stars. Maybe there were too many clouds or too much light pollution but I was tired and unimpressed. So we headed back to the car with my father in silent irritation and whether he was angry at the comet or me I don't know.

I could of course try and recall this a little differently, construct an alternative memory to exist alongside this one where I was really awestruck by the sight through the binoculars of this streaking sliver of light. With my father crouched next to me helping me hold the binoculars, speaking in a soft warm tone explaining how this comet travels through cold dark space being warmed by the light and love of the sun that gave birth to it, causing it to stream and sparkle like the magnesium fire on top of your birthday cake. Crossing these skies striking fear, awe and joy into the hearts of many men, reminding us of our place in the world and those things that are really important.

I understood not a word of it yet given how much I saw of him I enjoyed just being near him and in hindsight am grateful to have had moments like this however fleeting before he too disappeared into the night.