An Infinity of Infinities

Franco, my husband, was at Whole Foods yesterday in the enormous produce department: piles and piles of colorful fruits and vegetables as far as the eye of a small person could see. And he noticed a little kid point to a pile of golden brown objects, arranged in a pyramid, and ask his mother “What are those?” And she answered “pears.” 

Remember when you didn’t know what everything was in our world?

I love little kid stories. What could be cuter? The novel Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Chong, has a bunch of them that a father had written down when his daughter was small. I started a book I was going to write for my nephew Jake when he was born but I never kept at it. 

An old friend of mine told me this other story years ago. 

It was that she was at the beach with a friend’s daughter and the little girl, let’s call her Mia, pointing at the waves coming in, asked, “Is that the front of the world, and that’s the side (pointing up the sandy beach)? Or, is that the side of the world (pointing back at the waves), and that’s the front (pointing up the beach again)?

I loved that.

Here’s another one. I don’t know where I heard it.

There’s this toddler who’d always been terrified of going on an airplane. She’d seen planes in the sky all the time: tiny objects that streaked across the clouds. And her grandparents lived an airplane ride away, but because she was always so scared of flying, her family could never visit.  

Finally, finally, when she was five, after much cajoling by her parents, she agreed to be brave and go visit them.

And she was brave and did okay and boarded the plane, took her seat, and sat holding her mother and father’s hands — one on each side of her. And when the plane took off, she closed her eyes tight and squeezed her parents’ hands and waited. And waited. And waited. And when the plane reached a good altitude and leveled off, she opened one eye, and asked, in a tremulous little voice: “When do we get small?”

I’m always remembering that we live in an infinity of infinities, you know? That the planet is rotating fast: facing the sun during the day then facing away from it at night. Meanwhile, while the planet is spinning, it’s also moving along in a yearly path around the sun, just like all the planets in our solar system. And the whole solar system also advances, somehow slowly moving into new space around the galactic center. And our Milky Way galaxy is only a minuscule dot in space.

From everything science has been able to glean, with our biggest telescopes, there is no end to it all. 

Have you ever tried to picture infinity? It just keeps never ending! And, even if you tried to end it in your mind, the wall you’d put up would have to be infinite, too. 

All of this is why I believe that anything is possible.