"I remember the first time I observed this comet," the Elder spoke aloud for the first time in five centuries. "I was still a seedling rooted to Earth, long before the Age of Understanding, long before the Age of Awe."

The Elder's spores drifted closer. One of them, an unraveling larval string of biological coding not dissimilar to The Elder's own ventured a question.

"Elder, is this thing so rare as to warrant notice?"

The Elder allowed the upstart little spore a look of wonder-Wonder! The Elder had not felt wonder in a the span of a star's breath!-and tried to remember what it was like to smile, to remember what it was like to have a body of organic compounds.

"Come upstart spore, larval whisper of the memory of I and Those Before I. Understand the significance of this thing to I, and therefore Awe at the humble beginnings of I to better know thine own place in existence!"

A cool breeze veined in the frigid remnants of mountain snow flowed off the Ozarks to Donnie Earl Ray's house, where the boy and his mother stared in awe at the sky.

"Drink it in Donnie," she said as they marveled at the pale streak of light cascading through the sky. "Won't ever see it again in yer lifetime."

Donnie stood there, all eight years of his consciousness focused on the spectacle, jaw slack and eyes wider than the eponymous super-void he would create just off the arm of the known super-cluster four centuries later.

"D'ya think I'll ever go to space, mom?" he asked enthusiastically. "D'ya think I'll git to ride a comet?"

"Sure ya will baby," she assured him. "Sure ya will. Jus' don't let me see any more C's on yer report card!"

Donnie grinned but remained silent. They stayed out there for hours afterward, his mother answering what she could about space and then life and finally, Donnie fell asleep in her arms and she carried him inside to bed.

The Elder removed himself from the living stream of memory. The upstart spore's removal was more difficult, for it was always hard to leave behind the rustic Life-As-It-Was for a thought-to-be mundane existence growing beyond base organics.

"Elder!" it exclaimed excitedly. "It was not the thing itself that was important, it was the when intersecting with the thing!"

The Elder flared its mantle a little, approximating a 26th century nod.

"The dirty snowball mattered little; it was my mother's gentility, it was the chill air off mountains long since reduced to their base compounds, it was a sky never to be seen again aside memory. Blessed are ye, that there are Elders to share Life-As-It-Was rather than thou spores experiencing the pain of it! Be gone for a millennia, upstart spore, for I tire of thine inquiry!"

And so The Elder drifted away from the galaxy that held its once-home, to return in some future age when the thing known to mortals as 'the Hale-Bopp comet' ceased to exist.

(Sorry if this is a little disjointed, I've had a few beers and distractions.)