"Take as long as you want at the window, sir. Most folks don't say a word for about a minute. Some longer." The astronaut floated past with the casual courtesy of a man who has handed dozens of newcomers their first whole planet. I did not say a word for about a minute. The Earth was below the window. The blue of it had no boundary on it anywhere, which my father had once told me would be true and which I had not believed because I had been a boy. A second man drifted up beside me. He had the patch of an old shuttle mission on his shoulder and he ate sunflower seeds the way old ball-game men eat sunflower seeds, with one hand, without looking down. "You're gonna think this is dumb, partner. But the first time I saw it, I thought of my dad pointing at the sky during the seventh-inning stretch. Cardinals game, 1979, hot dog in his other hand. He said, 'Bud, the same sky over us is over everybody right now.' I was eight. I thought he was being corny." The seventh-inning stretch. A father pointing up between innings with a hot dog in one hand. The boy thinking the father was being corny because the boy was eight and the boy was right. I bowed slightly to the window. The window did not bow back. Windows do not bow back. "You're not gonna get a good picture of it, by the way. Don't try." Don't try. I had already lifted the camera halfway. I lowered it. A warrior does not waste a draw on a target he cannot honor. I looked at the Earth instead. The blue did the work for me. My father had also pointed at the sky over our village once, less famously, and I had been eight then too, and I had thought he was being corny too, because eight-year-olds in every village have the same job, which is to be slightly bored by their fathers. A third crew member floated by carrying a small bag of pretzels. She glanced out, like a person glancing at a kitchen window they have looked out of every morning for years. "That's home, hon. Pretty much." Pretty much. She said it the way some people say their husband's name. She did not stop floating. She did not need to. I stayed at the window. The shuttle veteran cracked another seed. "My dad died in '04, partner. Last thing he said to my mom was 'turn the game on.' Cardinals were losing. I think about that every time I'm up here." He said this calmly, between seeds, like a weather report. He did not look at me. He was watching the Earth too. He was not trying to give me anything; he was just talking next to a window that already happened to be open. I thought of the field trip my father had never taken me on, because there had been no money, and the parade he had pointed at the sky during instead, and the thing he had said that I had thought was corny and then had not lived long enough to repeat. I did not lift the camera again. I did not need the picture. The man's father had already given me one in 1979, in St. Louis, in the seventh inning, with a hot dog in his other hand. "Take your time, partner. Window's not going anywhere for a few orbits." I took my time. And when I am old, in my own quarters, on the ground, I will sit a small grandchild on my knee and point straight up at a perfectly ordinary sky, and I will say a thing the child will think is corny, and one day, much later, the child will remember it the way a man on a shuttle remembers a seventh inning in 1979.