AS A GIRL OF EIGHT OR NINE YEARS OLD, I remember walking home in the dark one summer night with my dad. Earlier I had gone to the little brick library near the entrance to our rural road. When the library closed, my dad came to walk me back up the steep hill to our house. As we rounded a bend some distance away from the traffic on the main road, my dad stopped.
"Look! There's the Big Dipper," he said with characteristic enthusiasm.
"Where?" I asked. I barely knew what a constellation was.
