The universe, the stars, and Dale Earnhardt

Tonight on CMT they aired the Dale Earnhardt Movie. It wasn't so much a movie as much as a documentary, but they called it a movie. I had been looking forward to watching it since they started hyping it a couple weeks ago. I sat down at 8:00 (after watching a 1 hour pre-movie show that wasn't terribly interesting) with huge anticipation. I was glued to the tv throughout the entire show. After the return from each commercial, they showed some footage of the 1998 Daytona 500 race. Each clip progressed a bit through the race, painting the picture for the last half hour of the show. At the last half hour, they showed his win at the finale of that race. For those who know Dale Earnhardt, they know that the Daytona 500 is the absolute biggest race in all of NASCAR, and that day, on his 20th attempt, NASCAR's biggest driver, and Daytona's winningest racer, finally one the biggest race of NASCAR and of Daytona. I still remember watching that race from my apartment in Rochester back in 1998. I was so excited that Dale finally won the big race that I couldn't hold the phone steady enough to dial my parent's phone number to share my excitement with my father. He must have have known, because just as I was about to give up, the phone rang. He knew before he called how excited I was.

Right after they showed his amazing victory, followed by the overwhelming images of every crew member of every team lining up to greet Dale on his way down pit road after the race, they fast forwarded to the Daytona 500 three years later... specifically February 18, 2001. On the last lap of the race, with dale running 3rd behind two cars that he owned, 2 turns from the finish line, dale crashed into the wall and lost his life. Just like the date 3 years earlier, I vividly remember exactly where I was and exactly what I was doing. I was complaining because dale wrecked on the last lap of Daytona... again. It wasn't for a couple hours that it was known that Dale earnhardt had died. In that moment, I was in shock and disbelief, astonishment, and total lonliness. I was in a funk that lasted for weeks. The worst part of the experience is that nobody understood why I was so upset about the death of a person that I had never met. Hell, I didn't even understand it. I couldn't explain it, but I sure felt it. Watching that show tonight, I felt it all over again. I got a tear in my eye when I watched the footage of his 1998 Daytona 500 win, and I cried like a teenage girl being stood up on her prom night when I watched the footage of the 2001 race, and the subsequent races after that one. It was just like reliving those weeks prior to his death again. As I watched those races back in 2001, I sat there with tears in my eyes, with friends and family completely unsure of why I was upset. Tonight I sat there with much the same feeling, hoping that kristin, sleeping next to me on the couch, wouldn't wake up and see me crying like a fool.


So what do the universe and the stars have to do with this? Two nights ago, I stood out on my deck, staring up into the sky. One of my favorite things about living up here, away from the lights of town, is that you get an absolutely jaw-dropping view into the vast universe that we're a part of. On a night with no moon, the view is absolutely breathtaking. I stood there thinking about how absolutely massive of a place the universe is, and how absolutely, completely inconsequential we are in relation to it. The universe is unfathomably huge. Just think about how far of a drive somewhere like florida and California are, then think that light can travel that distance in an almost infinately small period of time, yet those stars in the sky are so far away, that the light you're seeing took hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years to get from those stars to your eyes. That's a kind of huge that I can't even begin to comprehend. We are such a small part of that universe that we absolutely don't even count. So here I am, mystified by how absolutely meaningless everything really is, then two days later, I find myself completely overwhelmed with emotion by somebody whom I've never met, and who died 6 and a half years ago. Two days ago my life, nor no part of my life seemed to really have any significance at all, yet tonight I was completely overwhelmed by something as truely insignificant as a tv show. It's amazing how rapidly your perspective can shift. Now I think I'm going to have a bowl of cereal.