Wulff-Dieter Heintz Is Dead

Life is good. I do not have MS, AIDS, sit in a wheelchair, or work in retail selling things I don't care about.

It's 7:15AM on a Friday, June 23rd. Betty's on her way to work, Shaula's at my parents waiting to be taken to school, and I've dropped Matthew off at Betty's parents and picked up a parcel containing Sissy Haas's just-released Double Stars For Small Telescopes.

I sit on a green leather couch, a tall latté to my right, the National Post on my lap, and there's good 50s jazz in the air (the music is always good at Starbucks).

I read that the chief economist at National Bank and other banks expect the Canadian dollar to be at par with the greenback by the end of 2007. I become engrossed by an article by embedded journalist Michael Fumento about the "band of brothers" stationed at Camp Corregidor in Iraq.

I also learn of the death of astronomer Wulff-Dieter Heintz from lung cancer, at age 76:

In 1978, Heintz published a book, Double Stars, that became a "standard in the field, covering the subject in its entire length and breadth..."

At 8:15 I drive over to the Burnaby Public Library, Metrotown, and sit on a wooden bench under a tree, facing the main garden. The light of the northerly summer solstice sun gives rise to an abnormally blue sky and casts long shadows on the green lawn. The doors open at 9:00. I spend the next few hours seated by the magazine reading area's thirty-foot tall wall of glass skimming the Vancouver Sun, and some back issues of Hi-Fi News, the whole room suffused with a soft southern light. I open the parcel and have a glance at the Sissy Haas book.

I leave the library with a hardcover copy of Generation Kill, $2 from the library's discard/sale shelf. It's a first hand account from American combatants of the war in Iraq .

Double Stars, and Double Stars; Iraq and Iraq. The connectedness of things, the quality of light, the time of year. All this and more, normally squelched by that horror known as work. One day off and I learn of poor Wulff-Dieter's death, read a first edition, and lunch at an authentic Middle Eastern restaurant. While I might not be in retail, or mix pretzel dough or fix bowling-pin machines for a living, the issue of work as the destroyer of dreams remains.

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My ideal day of solitude: