stepped out last night because i heard there was a comet. the comet was supposed to be in the northwest, near the big dipper, in the early evening.

meanwhile i've been checking the news a lot. sixty six i am and it looks like we might have to homeschool our children. ok, we'll homeschool them. we live way the heck out in the country anyway. now's as good a time as any to get started.

way back in 1834 my ancestors arrived in quincy illinois and cholera had taken 6% of quincy's population in that very year. quincy was a bustling town - the railroads stopped there, but you could cross the river to hannibal or keep going west, or you could catch the riverboat steamers up or down the river - it was wild. but there had been the black-hawk war - that's where everyone got the cholera. the soldiers brought it in.

my great great great grandfather wanted to live out in the country, but he didn't have the land, or the house, and it was october when he landed there. he could build a house but that would take weeks or months. he had relatives out in the country and that's what he really wanted - to get out there and farm. but he couldn't yet. he holed up his family in a little house on the main street (called maine street) in what is today the historic district of quincy.

oh where was i with the stars. i stepped out last night, and there were a lot of stars, hundreds of them. thousands. it wasn't too hard to find the big dipper. there it was, off in the northwest. but here's the problem - lots of the stars were twinkling. any one of them could have been a comet. they seemed to be dancing in the sky. was it my eyes? an illusion?

back to my great-great-great grandfather. he had three boys, 5, 4 and 2, who had come 1600 miles in the wagon. they all virtually grew up together. he had a daughter in quincy, in that house, and measles came through, got the mom and the boys. measles was a pretty serious deal, you could die from it then, unlike now. the baby girl got only one measle and they all considered themselves lucky. everyone else got the not-so-bad kind also. it seemed they had dodged a bullet.

he did it - he built a house, and moved out into the country. it was just as a depression hit. there he was, though, out on a farm, with all these kids, and they figured out how to get by. illinois was better than maine - when you planted something, it came up. the ground was rich.

it was the age of steamboats. steamboats plied the river, up and down, from new orleans to saint paul. and they took the other rivers too - the missouri, the ohio, the des moines. you name it, they figured out how to get there by steamboat. they didn't have a calliope yet but that was coming. they had a rough crew and they had to grab a lot of wood from the shores to keep those steam engines running, but they did.

the two boys grew up side by side in the country outside of quincy. the older one decided to take a steamboat to saint paul, when he was 23. but he caught cholera, and died.

the second one, one year younger, was my great-great grandfather.

i saw a shooting star that night. it was off to the north a little ways. it was only for a second. it also was probably not the comet. who knows about the comet? there's an astronomer in the neighborhood - mr. hale, who actually discovered the hale-bopp comet in the house next to our house. he would have known exactly what he was watching. to me, it looked like a bunch of twinkling stars, with that one little shooting star, for just a minute.

i'm going to try to protect my kids. what else can you do?