Until I left high school and youth behind, the last happy years of my life were the early elementary school years in Hutchinson, Kansas. (McCandless Elementary School and East 14th Street, represent.) Now, Hutch was at that time known for three things: the Carey salt mines, the state fairgrounds, and either the world’s largest grain elevator or a fair contender for the title. My buddy Hoby’s dad worked at one, and he went to all the trouble to take my parachute-equipped G.I. Joe to the top and drop it off so it could float down to us.

Mr. White, you were a good soul.

One cool aspect of Hutch, for a lad excited about astronomy, was the planetarium. It was a small round building with a sort of domed ceiling, and one lay on the carpet to watch the ceiling projection show. Outside the building on clear nights, volunteers with telescopes would show us the Galilean moons and such. It was fun. I would eventually receive my own telescope, which would provide me many escapist hours in my later youth, and would finally in my fifties part with it. A school needed it more than did I.

About thirty years passed. I grew to adulthood, finished college, started to grow up for real, got jobs, got laid off, got engaged, broke off engagement, met future wife, moved in together. I decided to drive back home for a visit. I wanted to see family, reconnect with my childhood buddy Jeff and the elementary school teachers who had done me so much good, and most of all, have one last fully lucid visit with my ailing grandfather. The latter didn’t go so well, sadly, though it paid a dividend in that my relatives were angry on my behalf, with him, over the way he had spoken to me. I had no experience with that. I am still processing it.

But that happened after I met back up with Jeff. A great kid, he had grown into a great adult guy. We took our now-fairly-elderly teachers to dinner in Jeff’s family transport pod, and we had a wonderful time. They critiqued my penmanship with mock sternness. So odd it felt, these frail older ladies over whom I now towered, who had once held benign power over my joy or misery. It was so good to be able to let them know what good they had wrought.

The day after that dinner, Jeff took me to the Cosmosphere. The old planetarium, it seemed, had grown into a full-fledged aerospace museum. All right, sounds fine, let’s see what’s new there.

As an old Epinions crony of mine used to say, jeezum crow. In addition to the rocket standing outside, the SR-71 Blackbird on struts just inside the front door let me know that this was not my childhood planetarium, which seemingly had been dozed to make way for this huge modern museum. It had the Apollo 13, with burn pitting still visible. Soviet cosmonaut suits. A V-1. A Me-163 Komet engine. A restored V-2. It had more than you could imagine, including a brand new planetarium with reclining theater seats. Artifacts. Science exhibits.

Jeff suggested we see the rocketry demonstration, called Dr. Goddard’s Laboratory. It was in an insignificant little side room near the main entry hall. A young man used liquefied gases to demonstrate rocketry on a small scale. Kids wowed; we enjoyed. But while we enjoyed, I also had a very creepy, weird, ghostly feeling. I’m not very sensitive to that sort of thing. Something was strange, something I ought to know but could not place.

I looked about the room. It was round.

I looked at the ceiling. It was gently domed.

It was the old planetarium. It hadn’t been dozed. They had built the museum around it, and now used it for science demos.

I had been here, three decades before. I had lain on this carpet, or at least on whatever had covered this floor.

Some corner of the mind is eidetic, I think; the problem is that the mental library’s card cataloging and shelving system falls to hell. But it’s still in there, waiting to be jogged.