Earlier this month “Star Date” on KNAU caught me at a stoplight, so it sunk in through my idling split attention that pieces of meteors might delight one’s eyeballs in the wee hours of a Sunday or Monday morning. I even looked for more details at the Sky and Telescope magazine website. There it said the radiants of the Orionids would be near the raised arm of Orion. Look for shooting stars emerging there. Moonlessness will help the show. The skies look promising. Of course by nightfall I’d forgotten about it, and I hadn’t set an alarm. But my heavenly show time detection system must have been on anyway, because I stirred awake at two a.m. My skittery dreams moved along soon enough, but I felt reluctant to rise up on one elbow and pull up the wooden shades. However, eventually it occurred to me, “What would Mark Twain do?” As the Orionids are bits of Halley’s Comet and Twain famously came in with Halley’s Comet in November of 1835 and died the day after it returned in 1910, I was pretty sure Twain would open his eyes wider and pull up the shades. And what luck! I didn’t even have to stir from that cocoon of warmth under my Pendleton blanket. A small adjustment of head on my pillow and I could see Orion right through the window. Sweet.
It should be easy to keep one’s eyes open for balls of fire spurting into the night, but it wasn’t. The magazine had warned it might not be a particularly big display, maybe one every five minutes or so. Still, I thought I’d bag a handful of sightings anyway, enough to launch a few wishes. Surely wishes pinned to meteors come true, right. Was that one? Or maybe my trifocals just caught a blip of the nightlight. I make adjustments. Yes, THERE’S ONE! Very cool. I whisper a World Series wish. “Go Royals!” I study the stars awhile and think of long winter driving trips with Orion rising over the highway and dash of an old Volvo. And I try to remember just what is in that upright hand: a club, or is it a sword? Maybe I’m seeing it upside down. And why do I have to see a hunter anyway? Looks more like a Sufi dancer to me. Yes, a whirling dervish maybe. Or Jayne Lee on stage at Arcosanti doing a modern dance that seems to take her into a cloud as she lifts a stream of white cloth. Yes. To my movement-savoring self, those stars make the shape of a dancer of course. Maybe it’s even me stumbling through the two step at the Cash Inn in Phoenix. Or that friend on Facebook who invited everyone to join her in a studio for free form dancing on her birthday last week. That’s what I start seeing as I eye Orion and wait for more splinters to shine: varieties of dancers each with one arm raised in pleasurable abandon. It’s as much fun as adding more meteors to my life list, imagining dancers, until finally I can’t keep my eyes open. They close a second and that’s when stars fall, I just know it. I get both lids open at the same time and see nothing.
Then I stir from dozing and realize I’ve been in and out of sleep, tracking yellow. I do this sometimes if I am too awake. I’ll pick a color and survey memories to create a kind of slide show to soothe me. Yellow of trees along Birch Street quivering. Yellow of that jacket a friend wears all the time. Yellow of that Honda a friend drove forever. Eyes open, now echoes of yellow compete with my staring overhead through the window at constellation movement toward the roof. Yellow of those lone cottonwood trees along the Bright Angel trail in the Grand Canyon. Those wonderful trees below the Rim. From now until the new year they seem to change at their own idiosyncratic pace, bright yellow blots against cliff and canyon, as if someone was printing with a potato cut in half: dampening potato flesh with watercolor and stamping trees against orange rock.
There’s one! Maybe there IS a Fiat 500 in my future. Two meteors spotted, but two eyes sagging, so I am back to dozing through images with yellow.
Yellow like the rolled up slickers on the saddles of mule riders on the Bright Angel Trail. And that sound. With star gazing through dark stillness now I’m hearing the sound of mules in the Grand Canyon, the coconut shell clopping as a string goes by, the voices of riders teasing and exclaiming, gritty scrape of hooves against rock, and yellow slickers flopping. I think I need to see three meteors to say I’ve seen a shower. Will that be possible with eyeballs that feel like dried up limes? I must have been sleeping, Orion’s –no, The Dancer’s– feet are on the roof now. But I have one more wish. Thoughts of the Canyon make me want to score rooms at Phantom Ranch one more time this life. I want to collect a handful of friends–some who’ve never been–and lure my sister west for another fall or winter voyage down the trail past the yellow trees one by one, one more time. I’ll have yellow t-shirts printed and call us The Starry-Eyed Bright Angel Dance Society. We’ll pause with each tree to express ourselves and when the stars come out, we’ll do some variation on the Dance of Universal Peace by the mule bridge over the Colorado. I need a meteor with a long tail for this wish, if I can just keep my eyes open a little longer…
