Since getting a new car right in the middle of hail season, I learned to understand weather radar, and grudgingly began following the local news station's weather department on Twitter. I have occasionally gotten useful information about killer hailstorms moving through remote Texas counties, and more often get constant messages informing me that it's sunny outside, which is useful when I don't want to pop my head up out of my cube like a lonely gopher.
Last night, as I got home and closed the roof on the car, I got a Tweet asking viewers to send in their photos of the meteor shower.
I pictured people around Austin, living in the glare of their condo's colored lights or a big box store, rushing outside with tiny cellphones held up above them, ready to catch fleeting, momentary trails of fire, in skies where they could barely see the stars. So many of the things we want have taken the stars from us.
As a child, I spent most of my years with the well-defined and carefully-planned goal of being an astronaut. From an early age, I read outdated books by Gamov on the lives and deaths of stars. We lived in the country, with just our barbed-wire fence and tall grass between us and the city limits. Even with the lights of the highway, and the football stadium visible in the distance, over a mile away, the stars were out there to see.
I would look at star charts in Boy Scout books, and the little wheels showing the constellations and their positions in the sky at different times of the year and the night, but I couldn't make out the lines between them. I didn't see hunters and scorpions and mythical beasts. I couldn't even really see the big dipper. I saw a vast sea of potential and adventure pulling my eyes and heart upward, but not the patterns.
The other night, I drove back from a wedding two hours away, on a ranch deep in the country. My friend and I moved away from the house and tents and the lights of the dance floor, and despite the need to negotiate the rocky path beneath us, we gasped at the suddeness of the sky above, the stars bright enough to know they were other suns, burning with their own lives.
Despite the chill, we put the top down, drove fast and free on country roads. My friend was filled with simple joy, her hair buffeting around a smile constant even as she sang at the top of her lungs.
At this point in my life, I see the patterns, understand the familiarity and comfort humans have always felt in seeing familiar shapes up there. Some part of me is sad to know that the promise of the sky has been reduced to distant symbols. But on some nights, with a friend and music and the top down, I don't see a ceiling of darkness and points of light, but light years and lights years of heaven.
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