I was an adult before I ever saw a shooting star that I can remember. Incidental, walking back to my dorm at the end of a Saturday night. Winter. In a group, who knows what was being said or what language was being spoken and with what other accent. Missing a boyfriend, a love, hands in jacket pockets, bored by conversation and eyes turned upward. Ephemeral to my eyes, an end to a long journey-my feet kept moving, going down the steps that led us under the train tracks to more steps that allowed us up on the other side. Five years later, in a lake in northern Alabama at night–summer, then, but the night breeze was cool. I started closed off but warmed up in the water. Kisses and wine-stained lips and teeth, eyes went upward again and not just one but two or three, I alone saw them, maybe he was looking at me. When we moved up on the dock he was then the one looking up, and I down and around. Two, maybe three, and eyes couldn’t see. Six years before, at Tipitina’s uptown after a rain, quiet color all around with streetlights and stage lights and Doug Martsch’s fingers hitting the strings, plucking, picking, the vibrating music following right behind on heels of its own. Four years later, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlins in that branded art district, an intersection in nothingness, a newly constructed counterculture pocket with the occasional story sitting obscure but preserved in cracked amber age. A ruby stage of earthen clarity behind a foreground sea of darkness and silence wrapped up in velvet sound…Three months later, dancing jubilantly to the Little Ones in Manchester, Tennessee as the sun drifted around the corner; an hour later, lying on the benign blades of grass at the foot of the multicolored ferris wheel, joyous breath and peace and beauty and love inside and out. One year later, same place, dancing in the misting rain and in glowing adornment with the stage at a distance later cut in half, by then standing in a huddle like penguins, our blankets and towels off of the ground and on our backs and a jacket’s dondante in our ears recounting an epic life of its own. Three months earlier, arms around me and hands on me while my fingers stroked the black and white keys, a strange rebirth into a mad world of crashing and twisted connection, disturbing and glorious. Six years before riding in a red car in the quiet early morning pitch dark listening to a white album (mind on the blink), hearing a heart beat closely and a train’s shriek in the distance. The next summer, I stood in sand with computer generated waves in the background, dress swirling and stars lighting up like traveling Christmas lights with my laughter, and five years afterward standing at the banks of a swollen and mighty river with an orange slice moon suspended above and lights shimmering on her black mercurial ripples as our strong and vulnerable bodies stand on vulnerable land, drunken shouts–intended disruptions–breezing past us in the wind as we drink in her power in peaceful lapping; nature’s bodies communing with little ole me during the origin of it all, how beautiful is that.