My Father the Stargazer
Carl Sagan
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934, Carl Sagan was an astronomer, astrobiologist, astrophysicist, and author. Perhaps best known for writing and narrating Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the most-watched PBS series to date, Sagan was also a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He was married three times and had five children, Jeremy, Dorion, Nick, Alexandra, and Samuel. He died in 1996 at age sixty-two.
as much as i miss my father, I can’t help but take joy in knowing that I’m not alone in missing him. His work still awakens a sense of wonder in literally millions of people around the world, inspiring a lasting desire to learn about the cosmos. In this sense, he’s more present in his absence than so many of us are in our presence. And though he was many things to many people, he was my dad, and I got to see the big thinker up close.
My father had a knack for pinball and knew just how hard to bump a machine without tilting it. When we’d go to arcades together, he’d win bonus games like mad. Video games, on the other hand, were never his thing. I remember the day I showed him Computer Baseball, a strategy game for the Apple II that came out in 1981. In the game, you could pit some of the greatest teams in MLB history against each other. We played Babe Ruth’s 1927 Yankees against Jackie Robinson’s 1955 Dodgers for about an hour. Then he turned to me and said, “Never show this to me again. I like it too much, and I don’t want to lose time.”
But he could—and did—spend hours watching basketball. He was a huge fan. We’d watch NBA games whenever possible, wondering if this would be the year Patrick Ewing would lead the Knicks to the championship. (The answer was always no.) He’d point out the coaches and tell me what they were like as players back in the years before I was born. Dad never liked it when a visiting player went up to take a foul shot and the home team fans made noise and waved towels trying to distract him. He objected on principle—he didn’t think it was sporting. There’s something so decent about that.
I remember my mother getting increasingly upset one night in the summer of 1976. She wanted me to go to bed, but Dad and I were watching the NBA Finals. It was the Boston Celtics versus the Phoenix Suns. Dad had promised I could stay up until the end of Game Five. Overtime. Then double overtime. Then triple overtime. Finally, the Celtics won, 128–126. Man, what a game.
My dad was a fantastic debater. He could, and did, take William F. Buckley Jr.’s politically conservative arguments apart when he appeared on Buckley’s television show, Firing Line. When I was a kid, Dad and I frequently debated, too, but after my “Why you should buy me a cool dirt bike” argument failed to gain traction, I realized that my powers of persuasion didn’t quite match up to Buckley’s. But Dad always listened and gave me credit for making valid points. Often we’d find ourselves debating popular culture. For instance, he did not like the movie Aliens. I thought it was fun, scary, cathartic; he thought it was needlessly violent and wondered why extraterrestrials must be portrayed in such a negative light.
He had mixed feelings about Star Wars. I remember watching it with him, and when we reached the part where Han Solo brags that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs,” he made an exasperated sound. I asked him what was wrong, and he explained that a parsec is a unit of distance, not time.
“Dad, it’s just a movie,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, “but they can afford to get the science right.”
We argued about The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-Head, which, as a kid, I loved. Both shows made a bad first impression on him. I persuaded him to give The Simpsons another chance, and he eventually saw what all the fuss was about and grew to genuinely enjoy it. I don’t think I ever won him over on Beavis and Butt-Head, though. “They’re not meant to be role models,” I protested. “It’s a subversive critique.” Nope, not his cup of tea. But he was a big fan of David Lean epics like Doctor Zhivago and, especially, Lawrence of Arabia. He loved that transition where Peter O’Toole blows out the match and the film cuts quite suddenly to the Nafud desert.
One of the things about my father that makes me smile even today is remembering the interesting noises he made. His laugh was explosive and uninhibited—the kind of laugh that made you feel good for making him laugh. His sneezes were booming. And sometimes he’d talk to animals in their native tongue. When we’d see dolphins at the aquarium, he’d greet them in a reasonable approximation of dolphin speak. (They’d often answer him. I have no idea what they said.) But my favorite sound of his was the one he’d make upon discovering something intriguing and new, some idea or possibility that impressed him or opened up a fresh way of looking at things. It was a kind of “aaah.” One of my proudest moments was when we were watching “Attached,” the first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I had written. Within minutes of the opening credits, my dad made that “aaah” sound. Turning to me with a beaming smile, he said, “That’s really good, Nick.” And this continued for the entire show. The completeness of how much he loved what I’d done, that genuine sense of enjoyment, stays with me. It gave me a sense of respect and approval I treasure like nothing else.
Carl and Nick (four years old) in Ithaca, New York, 1974