Diane Bush
bakery and worked with fire like my dad. Deftly slashing patterns into rising loaves with a razor blade then quickly navigating the batards, boules, and baguettes into the tall oven with a long-handled wooden peel required strong shoulders, a delicate touch, and a close relationship with the worry of time and danger. Thick welding gloves helped protect me, but bum scars still pepper my hands and foreanns. Baking is magic. A thick goo of flour, salt, and water transforms itself into a perfectly browned, intensely fragrant sourdough loaf. Sprinkling flour on my workbench, I made galaxies appear and reform with the flick of my wrist. Growing up, I never imagined I would bake bread for a living. I wanted to be an astronomer but was lousy at math. I secretly hoped for a telescope to see nebulae, which in pictures looked like bright bubblegum clouds and sparkling white-hot stars. I wondered how something measured in light-years was invisible to the naked eye. Too near-sighted to stargaze with Dad, my older sister lost interest as soon as he started a lesson. He gave up on her and when I was old enough, we headed outside. "That's Castor and Pollux," Dad would say, pointing to the constellation Gemini, his voice a deep pebbly rumble from years of exposure to smoke and soot. In the wan glow of starlight, I could see the sheen ofVitalis in his thinning gray hair. There were other names: Arcturus, Aldebaran, Spica. Even now, the names roll off my tongue like a long-lost language. Why don't parents name their children after stars? Not celebrities like Britney and Brad-there are enough of those in the world-but constellations, heavenly bodies. T he idea takes root while I page through a stapled file of yellowing papers that belonged to my father titled "Star Identification." I pause to study a list of star and constellation names and their pronunciations. Intriguingly, many names have Arabic origins. I later discover that Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer living in Egypt, devised the earliest known star catalog in the middle of the 1st century AD, translating the original Latin and Greek names into a language Arabians could understand. Ptolemy "named" stars by where they were situated within constellations. Today's parents, on the hunt for an unusual child's name, might experience a disconnection between a lyrical star name and its meaning. On the surface, Mirach seems decent enough until you learn it means abdomen because of its location in the lower partthe girdle-of the constellation Andromeda, known as The Chained Maiden. How about En if (nose), the brightest star in the constellation Pegasus, or Fomalhaut (mouth of fish) in Pisces Australis? Once you know their meanings, these names are hardly inspiring; but others, such as Alnai'ir (bright star) and Alnillam (string of pearls), would make lovely girls' names. And what young boy wouldn't want the name Shaula (sting of scorpion) or Altair (the flying)? For their second child, my parents hoped for a boy and planned to name him Samuel. Instead, they named their youngest daughter after the Roman goddess Diana, a name that means divine. My father had a special nickname for me: Sam. He didn't seem disappointed that I wasn't a boy, and I didn't hesitate to act like one. Athletic and outdoorsy, I spent hours at a nearby creek with my Aunt Fan (who lived with us) picking black raspberries and playing softball and tackle football. 88
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