Don’t You Know That You Are A Shooting Star?

On a dark and clear night, I can look up and see a sky full of stars. I actually grew up on a farm, so I could see many more than most for two reasons. For one, there was virtually no other man-made light to compete with the starlight. Second, I can literally see for miles around where I grew up. I liked to take it to another level, literally, by climbing up on a roof, lying back, and looking around. They don’t call it “the milky way” for no reason. It really looks like a streak of milk in very black coffee—on a dark and clear night.

A scientist actually sees more than I do. They see planets and moons and all of that. I know which one is Venus, but that is it. So, I call them “stars.” But, I know there is more to it than that. I also know that a shooting star is not really a star at all. A shooting star is an object that is burning up as it passes through the earth’s atmosphere, leaving a brief visible trail. That’s just the kind of cold, factual analysis that you would expect from a scientist. But seeing a shooting star is awesome! It’s a flash of brilliance! Then, it’s over so quickly that it leaves you both wishing you could see more and almost wondering if you really even saw it the first time.

Let me tell you about a shooting star that flashed through my own life.

Lynn was the new kid in our class in fourth grade. Her last name and my last name are alphabetically close, so she sat in the desk in front of me. She was very quiet. Well, in a way… She wasn’t really shy. She had moments when her convictions would overtake her and she would speak up or act out passionately and/or loudly as the case may be. But, she was not a loud kid, or a bossy kid, or a joker, or anything most of the time. She would just sit there and not say anything, but there seemed to be a whole lot going on inside. Kids don’t really know what to do with that. They can “sense” it, though, and it caused most of us to keep our distance for the most part, but I don’t know why. So, Lynn was a loner, I guess you could say.

By the time we reached junior high, Lynn had a reputation as a bookworm. Schools these days have programs to encourage students to read. They have elaborate point systems for different books, online tests they take, and grand awards ceremonies for their achievements. Many kids get recognized in those ceremonies. We had nothing like that. Almost no one else was reading anything. Lynn, however, was extremely impressive. The teachers and librarians not only noticed but were so impressed that they created awards to recognize her achievements each year. No one else got any such award or were interested in trying, as far as I know. When we would hear the statistics of the tens or hundreds of thousands of pages she had read and the hundreds of books, it just boggled our mushy brains. We knew she was always reading something, but it was just so un-fathomable. We were not in her league by any measure.

Our little school only went through junior high. The town only had one high school, too. So, everyone merged into the “big” school at that time. That meant more and different friends to go along with more and different opportunities. Lynn, like the rest of us, was mostly the same, just more grown up—more emboldened. Her locker was still near mine. One day, she surprised me by moving in—into whisper mode—and asking what she should do if she thought someone was taking drugs. Not your average every-day conversation, y’know? Of course, I did not know what to say at first. Lynn was good for that kind of thing. She said nothing so much and then when she did it was monumental. Also, she was good for asking my advice on her monumental ordeals. I felt privileged to be her councilist. I thought about it a second and decided I needed more information. She said she thought she saw a dude (classmate, locker a few doors down) sneaking some pills a minute ago. He was looking around suspiciously and trying to hide it—that sort of thing. I thought some more. I knew who he was. So did she. It’s not like we were really friends, but we had classes together, we had talked before and were likely to talk again. For both of us, part of the issue was doing the right thing—for us and him—without “ratting” on him. I finally advised her to tell someone with authority. I think my specific advice was the School Counselor. He would take a softer approach than the principal and give us the best chances for anonymity. I know she told someone. I know the question was asked. But, I don’t think he got “busted” in any way involving cops or courts. He was miffed, but it worked out well, all things considered.

Not everyone would have done that. Not me, either. I only got involved because she brought me into it. I don’t have a great track record for that kind of thing. I was at a dance that same year. It was a big deal for me because it was a high school dance, not a junior high dance. It was also a public dance, not a school dance. The lights were darker. The security was more lenient. The crowd was older and rougher than I was used to. One kid was obviously drunk. Well, he wasn’t the only one, but he got my attention when he backed his girlfriend up against a pillar in the room in an argument. As it got worse, he had both of his hands around her shoulders, too. I remember just staring at the whole thing wondering when or how to do something. He was not necessarily hurting her yet. But, obviously this could escalate. (No, I did not use CSI terms like escalate back then, I just knew that this was likely to get worse before it got better.) So, there I was, frozen and useless, waiting for him to hit her, I guess. I don’t know what I would have done, because he was much older and would easily have kicked my ass. Plus, I was pretty sure he really wanted someone to give him a reason to become his personal punching bag. I knew I was in big trouble when she turned her head and looked around in a silent plea for someone to help her. I’ll never forget the look on her face—the fear. And that is when a pack of girls stepped between them so quickly and effortlessly that it left me wondering what happened. Before I knew it, there were several of them, Lynn among them, in his face verbally affronting him. How they got in there so deftly, I still don’t understand, but they didn’t do it physically. They just started hurtling questions at him, “What are you doing? You’re hurting her! Can’t you see how scared she is? What are you thinking? What’s wrong with you?...” and he was drunk, so he had no mental capacity to respond to any of it. So, he just sort of stood there all slumpy like a kid getting a lecture from his mom. Then they turned to her and enveloped her like only a group of girls can do and whisked her off to safety. I was amazed. I’ll never forget that whole scene. I’ll never forget feeling so helpless and then being so awestruck by the shear brilliance of how it was resolved. I learned a lot from that which I still carry with me to this day. For not unrelated reasons, I almost never went to dances after that.

That’s not to say I don’t like dancing. I really do. I just don’t like drama. But, my favorite Lynn story happened our junior year. Ever the advocate, Lynn came up to me in whisper mode again and bluntly asked, “If a girl wanted to ask a guy to a dance, how should she do it?” Again, why me? Who does she think I am? But I didn’t say anything like that. She was asking for some help that she thought I could provide, so I owed it to her to give it my best shot. That is how I thought about it. Of course, I was also thinking that I was giving HER advice on how SHE should go about asking some dude. I was pretty sure that she was not going to be asking me. The thought went through my head, but I quickly dismissed it as being too weird and direct, even for Lynn. So, I thought for a second about all of this and advised her to just go right up to him, make sure she got his full attention, eye contact, that sort of thing and ask politely but in very direct and unmistakable words so he would have no easy way to avoid giving the direct answer she deserves. She seemed to think that was pretty good wisdom. She thanked me and walked away into the crowd of students in the hall making their way from and to the next class. Then, somewhere out of that crowd came Suzi. And in a polite but direct language she proceeded to look me straight in the eye and ask me the Snowball Dance. What a dope I am. How did I not see that coming? Here’s the thing about Suzi. There’s nothing wrong with Suzi. One of the many activities our school had in Physical Education (aka Phy. Ed., gym, you know the one) was dance. Social dance—like training for a wedding dance of the day. So, we learned to waltz and square dance and two-step and even jitterbug (which you might call swing.) And over the course of that, Suzi and I were dance partners. And over the course of that, it was a mutual decision to be dance partners. I really enjoyed dancing with her, and I got the same impression from her. But we were not a couple, in high school terms. Neither of us really dated anyone. Give me the same situation and 10 times out of 10 I take Suzi up on her offer. And, I did, technically. I was so surprised by the whole thing that I was less than smooth about it. I think I probably sent several discouraging signals to her in my fumbling. I did have some stupid high-school-boy “reasons” for not wanting to go out with Suzi, but this was just one dance. As it turned out, the whole thing got canceled by weather and that was the end of all of it. Now, it’s just one of those awkward high school memories that hangs on as if to demand a better closure, as irrational and unlikely as that may be.

I lost track of Lynn after high school. I never went to our 10 year reunion. Somewhere in there, I did get a brief call from Lynn. It was out of the blue. I had not spoken to her in all that time. She was very excited about getting to see all of these old friends. I was not. And that was essentially the awkward end to the call. But, that was how I felt at the time.

And then, one day I got a different phone call. It was a reporter. She wrote for a Chicago news paper. She was calling me because I (unknown to me) was the only classmate who appeared in Lynn’s class on Classmates.com—a relatively new tool at the time. She was trying to get background information about Lynn from those who had known her. Wait a minute! “What do you mean HAD known her?”
“Oh… I thought you would have heard by now… I’m so sorry to have to tell you like this…but…umm… Lynn was murdered on St. Patrick’s day.”

Stunned does not begin to describe how I felt. Why? No, that’s not the question. How? Well, it turns out that Lynn had decided to give a woman hitch-hiker a ride. That did not surprise me. It also did not surprise me that Lynn had chatted her up in the process. Evidently, as they drove Lynn cordially pointed out the apartment where she lived as they passed nearby on the Interstate. Later this woman went back, found her, stabbed her many times to death, robbed her, and tried to burn the place down. Actually it was worse than that. I’ll spare both of us more details.

So, Lynn had managed to whisper-mode me one more time. I answered the reporter as best as I could. The problem was that my whole perspective was from 4th grade to high school. So, I said stuff like how it made sense to me that she would be trying to do what she felt was the right thing and trying to help someone out and how that was the kind of person I knew her to be. And all of that sounds fine, except for what it leaves out.

I had to do my own interviews with friends who were closer to Lynn and had kept in touch to learn who she had become over the years that I missed. I was very convicted to do so. I felt like I had deprived her of the chance to show and tell me herself. If I had been through so much and changed so much, certainly she had her own stories to tell and I never even gave her the chance—for my own selfish and self-centered reasons. And it was really cool to hear some of those stories. She had become much more socially out-going. She enjoyed clubs and going out with friends. She had been looking forward to St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. But, also, she has a mutual friend with me that became a pastor. She had also had those questions and conversations. She had recently been inspired to work at a soup kitchen. And, well, who knows what else?

The 1975 Bad Company song “Shooting Star” is about a different kind of death, and life, than Lynn’s. But what is the same is the brevity. What is the same is the brilliance. What is the same is the feeling after a shooting star flashes through a dark, clear night sky.
“Wow! “
“Did you see that?” “
“That was awesome!”
“Did you see what I saw?”
“Is it over already?”

But, mostly, how lucky am I to have been in the just the right place at just the right time to have seen it.

Dragons Live Forever, But Not So Little Boys

It’s been a long time since I was a little boy. In many ways, my mind is stuck in those days. In others, I have to really think hard to bring it all back. Some ideas are forged together strangely—from the heat and pressure, I guess. I saw the movie Pete’s Dragon in a theatre as a young little boy. For some reason, whenever I hear the song “Puff the Magic Dragon” I think of Pete’s Dragon. Part of me wants to see the movie again, so I would actually know what it was about, but a bigger part wants to just leave those scattered images right where they are, as they are. But, there’s much, much more behind that thought.

See, I had a friend named Pete, too.

I first remember Pete from first grade. My desk was right behind his. We both had the same color of red hair, which is that un-mistakeable color of red. Not a redish hue of blond, or a lightish brown. Red. Leprechaun red. Other people in our families had the red hair, too, but no one else in the school did. Granted, it was a small school, but the impact was the same. Evidently, red heads look funny to other kids. Although, anything that is not like everything else is “funny” to kids and subject to ridicule. Maybe everything is subject to ridicule. I don’t know. Either way, we did not enjoy being red heads. Adults seem to enjoy us little red headed kids, but that mostly just made it worse.

Our houses were nowhere near each other, so Pete and I only spent time together in school and with the other kids around. But, again, it was a small school, so the whole class playing together was still a pretty close-knit group. We had the most fun a recess. For many years, of those early years, the fad of the day was marbles. Now, I can say marbles and everyone knows what I’m talking about, but the way we played marbles and what it all meant was probably different than the rest of the world. For one, we played one at a time, and we always played for keeps. In other words, I would challenge one of my marbles against one of yours. And much negotiation took place in this process. We were always trying to win better marbles, so I was negotiating to try and get you to wager a marble that impressed me. And you would be doing the same thing. Some of the prized possessions were what we called “boulders” which were particularly large (about 1 inch diameter or slightly larger-- bigger was better) and among the most elite of these were “steelies” (actually large ball bearings, but they were large!... and shiny!... and didn’t scratch… and they had that great heft to them! ) or “clearies” which were the translucent, one color type. They looked like rounded gem stones. Beautiful. Of course, envy played a gigantic role in all of this. Without knowing anything else about a person, we sized them up by their marble bag. Pete and I (and many of my other elementary school friends) played and traded many marbles.

We played football a lot! For one thing, this is North Dakota we’re talking about. We have snow 6 months out of the year some years. Also, football season begins when school does and lasts just over half the school year. We loved to watch it, but mostly we loved to play it in the snow. Snow on the ground, even a mere few inches somehow makes landing softer. The sliding also leaves fewer stains on clothes and scratches on skin. We played all our rough and tackle games in the long snowy winters of ND. It was awesome! If you know how to enjoy it, winter is really fun.

Back in those days it seemed like the Pittsburg Steelers and/or the Dallas Cowboys were in the Superbowl every year. I grew up a Steelers fan. We had a conveniently even split in our class. So, we almost always played Steelers vs. Cowboys football at recess. Back then, we had as many as 3 recesses a day. The morning and afternoon recess was only 15 minutes. Lunch was half an hour. That seems paltry as an adult, but was plenty of time for a game as kids. Some of those years, I spent time as the QB of our team. It was an informal process as to who was QB. We pretty much based it on success. As long as we were winning or moving the ball, we stuck with what worked. When things went downhill, we’d unceremoniously fire that guy and quickly decide who we thought had the mojo to win. Call it a pecking order. Call it a “team captains picking order” or whatever. Young boys know what’s what.

We had no pass rush. The QB had to stay behind the line of scrimmage at all times. Everyone else was a receiver. That’s how we played. Everyone on defense was covering a receiver. Pete was an excellent receiver. Some guys just know how to get open. One way to do that is to “go long.” Pete was good for that. It’s actually pretty hard to cover someone that is just running as fast as they can. If you run ahead of them, all they have to do is stop and turn around to catch the ball. If you run behind them, they QB just has to lead them. Pete was good for both. But, mostly he was just plain committed to catching the thing. If he had to jump on your head to do it, he would. If he had to dive for the ground and load his sleeves and collar with snow, he would. Receivers like that make QBs look good. Any time you can consistently go long and make a successful catch, that’s going to be a fun game. Ah, the glory days! They’ll pass you by…

We played basketball some. For the longest time, we did not have the proper equipment on the playground. When we reached junior high, we got a new principal and he made some great changes from our perspective. Early fall and late spring provided some decent basketball weather. Basketball is hard to play in mittens, boots, and coats. The great thing about playing basketball with Pete was that he was fearless. We called him Pistol. Yeah, as in Pistol Pete, but not really. We called him Pistol because we could get him to shoot from anywhere. It didn’t matter where he was on the court or if he was well defended. All we had to do was yell, “Shoot it!” and he would. It was more fun than a real game. We were not that good, and we were often congested on the court. This is where a trained player or coach would go into the supreme aspects of basketball as a team game which creates opportunities to get open and find the open player. Whatever. We only had 15 minutes. We wanted to watch Pete launch it from half court with a hand in his face. That was fun! He actually made several of them, too.

Another improvement that principal made was computers. At first, we only had two. They were set up in the science room and we had to sign up to use them. It was a huge issue, logistically, for anyone in our family to not have to ride the bus home, which left right after school let out, basically. Same thing for “before school.” That was the only access time (because science classes were going on at recess). But, it did happen. I use to get so excited that the first thing I had to do was go to the bathroom. It was a big deal. Some of us used to take babysitting jobs just because the parents had a computer that we could use once we got the kids to bed. That was our payment. And we actually thought it was a pretty good deal. A few years later, my two brothers and I pooled our money together and bought that computer. It was an Apple IIe. Over the next few years, I learned and did much programming on that thing. My greatest accomplishment was a program I called Draw. I figured out how to make a glorified Etch a Sketch. The graphics were a poor definition in those days—about as good as an Etch a Sketch. So, holding down the “m” key to draw a line from any desired point on the screen down, made sense. I was old enough to get the formulas right to make a circle when I hit “c” and entered my desired diameter. It’s not much of stretch from there to make an arch or an oval. You get the idea. The biggest problem was that the world has never been sold on Apple computers. All of my programming skill was mostly useless by high school.

Pete was smarter than that. Pete used the computer to play games. One of his favorites was this game where he was a gun that arched 180 degrees left to right. Out of the sky would descend little paratroopers. The objective was to shoot the plane and the paratroopers. You could succeed either by shooting the trooper himself or dissevering him from his parachute and watching him splat to the ground. It was pretty fun. But, all video games are inherently fun. It goes without saying. Pete took a perverse pleasure in that gun, though. He made his own sound effects for good hits and the various deaths of his enemies. It was just as fun to watch and listen to him play as to play myself. He once joked that the game represented his ideal life: just him on his own island and a great big gun!

Pete and I and our small class of mates mostly lost track of each other around high school. Our small school only had nine grades. Today, it is only an elementary school. So, we all went to the one big high school with everyone else in town. We had more people to meet and know. We had more opportunities and interests. And we had the greater freedom that high school provided, including the ability to drive out of town from time to time. We started running in different circles. But, we still knew each other. We still bumped into each other and generally knew what each other was doing. We just were not doing it together for the most part.

After high school, Pete went into the military. I went to college. I saw him a handful of times when we both happened to be “home.” Eventually, we both ended up living in our home town again. But, we were almost strangers by that time. Our circles had grown further and further apart. Young men have other things on their agendas, if you know what I mean.

And then one day, the whole town heard the tragic news. You see, Pete had been murdered. By his own brother, who was living with him at the time. It was a murder/suicide, actually. Gunned down, through the apartment window, in fact. In a small town, any killing is a big, tragic story. This one was even bigger than that.

Their apartment is very near the high school. I see that house very often to this day. That and many other things often remind me of Pete. People like me write about stuff like that. It’s just what we do.

Pete was killed about 7 years ago, as of this moment. At our class reunion, we planted a tree to his memory, with his family. To anyone other than us, it’s just another tree in the park. To anyone other than us, we are just more faces in the crowd, small heads in old pictures, names in old books, and memories in old heads. But, memories are timeless. Memories live forever.