A Pale Blue Dot

Grandson duties yesterday required me to coral the darling little monster and herd him into a wire pen filled with death machines, otherwise known as a playground. The place was deserted apart from a small group of five small children and their two dogs. I sat my aged bones down on a particularly evilly built bench obviously designed to make you stand up as quickly as possible. But I'm built of stubborn stuff and continued to sit as the darling GC ingratiated himself with the dogs and children in the Pit of Fun.

The dogs doggedly put up with his kind, though rough, administrations for a mere few minutes before skulking over to me with pleading desperate eyes. They recognised a much put upon kindred spirit I suppose. Despite minding my own business, soon I was delightfully surrounded by small children and smelly dogs.

"I'm Chloe," said a small girl who had decided entirely without invitation to sit close along with her large dog which she plonked on her lap, "and I'm eight, and this is Patch," she added offering me the somewhat hot dog. 

I declined as politely as possible as I neither like hotdogs nor hot dogs.  
'And this is Lucy, she's four...' 'No I'm not! I'm five,' Lucy interrupted, offended. 'Yeah, she's five,' Chloe agreed with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. I'm sure girls are born grown up. 'It's Suzy here that's four.' Little Suzy said nothing, smiling up shyly. 

I smiled back and nodded and looked for an escape. But there was none.  The DGC had made friends and now I was also friend, like it or not.

The eldest of the little group was a quiet young boy who unlike the others, said nothing. For a while... Then he piped up with, 'I'm named after a footballer.' 

I was then informed of his family's desire to name him after a couple of footballers before eventually settling on one Ole Guntar Saltbender or something like that, so he was called Oliver. Oliver was in charge of the biggest dog, a Labrador, which was currently constantly trying to shake hands with me. Or pleading to be rescued, I'm not sure. He also seemed - Oliver that is, not the dog - to be in charge of the group. 

Oliver, aged eleven he announced, proceeded to also inform me he had ADHC. I said I was surprised as he seemed very calm and mature, which was true. He shrugged. I asked if he had any siblings and he told me three, all a good eight to ten years older. That might in my mind account for some of the ADHC, if his elder siblings marginalise him as can sometimes happen. He then announced he went to another, and by implication, much better school than the local one.  

'So you are very clever then?'

He shrugged. Oliver it seemed, liked shrugging. 'I like science. I'd like to go to the Moon.'

I was shocked. I would have expected a family that names its children after spoilt footballers would have inculcated their offspring directly into sporting directions. His announcement of being named after a footballer now took on a different complexion to me. Perhaps he wasn't particularly proud of that fact at all.

'Well, if you wanted, you could.'

He looked askance at me. 'No, really, you could. Did you know that a long time ago before you were born we sent a spacecraft to the stars and before it left our Solar System it took a picture of us here on our planet, the Earth? And do you know what that looked like? What we look like? Just a pale blue dot. A small point of light lost amongst billions of stars. We all must go to the Moon and then on to the stars, if we are to survive as a race.' 
I fished out my iPhone and found the famous picture of our world lost in the vastness of billions of stars.
'Here, have a look.'

I was delighted to see his eyes widen as he took in the picture and what I'd said, ignoring the babble of constant chatter from the  girls around us. 
Then he looked up from the phone and questioned my statement.

'But why do we need to leave to survive?'

'Because our little world is too small for us. Look what happened to the Dinosaurs!'
'Oh? What?'
'An asteroid hit the Earth and wiped them out.'
His mouth hung open, eyes wider than ever.
'Have you heard of a man called Carl Sagan?' I asked.

'No?'

'Well, he was the man who ordered the spacecraft to take this picture. He also helped with its mission.   Look him up on Google. If you can find it, read his book called 'The Pale Blue Dot' I have a feeling you'll like it.'

'Carl...?'

'Sagan'.

He frowned and I could see him struggling to commit the name to memory. 

'Ok, I will.'

With a last look at the image on the iPhone, the incessant demands of friends and childhood took over from this surprising conversation with an eleven year old. But as I dragged the delightful and now screaming DGC back to his mother and left them to it, he gave me a little wave and a smile. 
Perhaps some seed was planted in the mind of that strangely serious little boy thanks to the magic of a small picture taken from millions of miles away and viewed on a phone. I'll never know of course, but one day maybe he will travel to the Moon. And that thought gives me a warm feeling that perhaps that ambition might have been a result of our  small conversation together. In a chanced meeting in the midst of an empty unremarkable playground on a lonely pale blue dot lost in space.