I do not remember being afraid of the dark as a child. My father made the night sky seem like a grand adventure with his stories, remnants from his college science classes mixed with lore he picked up from what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel. On evenings when Dad wasn’t working the graveyard shift at the gas station, my little brother, Nicholas, and I would grab blankets and snacks and beg him to take us outside. We would pile into his gold pickup, drive into a clearing in the Blue Ridge foothills in Upstate South Carolina, and stargaze from the bed of the truck. If we remembered, somebody would grab the binoculars my father used at NASCAR races and tilt them to the sky, searching for the planets we could identify. Sometimes we found Venus, or Jupiter. We would giggle as he told
