All the lovely evenings we've spent painting the stars

                The worst thing about airports were the parents. The harried, tired-looking, parents, trudging around the airport with children slung to their backs like pictures of primitive man, or holding tightly to the hand of a little three year old who is either being reminded to hold onto his bag or being promised that if he can just keep it together for another few minutes he’ll get an ice cream or a treat, or avoid a spanking, depending on parenting style. Some of the parents were good at it, smiling as he walked past them, holding on to the two arms of their toddlers as they tried to learn to walk or swooping them up with a kiss after they started crawling across the unimaginably filthy floors.

                But the ones that he really watched that made him the saddest were the moms traveling alone. Something about a brood of kids with both parents in tow left a feeling of organized chaos, but watching a mother travel alone was to witness the chaos without the organization. These women would be carrying three bags on rail thin shoulders, coaxing a two-year old out from under a table while with their left hand they feed a baby a bottle ineffectually. These were the faces that he swore he’d remember years down the road when he found himself thinking of having children of his own, these poor, tired women, walking alone down a long hallway barely holding their shi- together.

                On the flight he sat down quickly and quietly, swinging his bag up into the overhead compartment and sliding into the middle seat. He pulled a book from his bag and began to read. Except, he wasn’t really reading, rather, he was watching the people shuffle past him on the flight, thinking about the egalitarian nature of flying in coach and hoping, if he was honest, to see some attractive face, looking anxiously at her ticket before sitting next to him. It was a nice way to pass the time, trying to guess at what the future might hold, connecting him to everyone that had ever existed in the history of the world.

                The girl who sat next to him was not conventionally pretty. Actually, she was conventionally pretty in a bland sort of Caucasian way. He was terrified of flying. The old joke went that he was actually quite fine flying it was crashing that he was worried about. This wasn’t true though. He hated flying. He found takeoffs to be the worst and generally spent them in prayer. He was not showy about it, but closed his eyes and prayed to a God that he mostly ignored to please keep him safe as he flew through the air, debasing himself to say, once and for all, that if only he could make it through this trip he’d be better once he got back on the ground. On the ground, if he lived, he swore he’d change. The fact that he was never struck by lightning at the conclusion of these trips when he so brazenly forgot his promises as soon as the wheels touched the ground was either weakness of character or a confirmation that he needn’t have been praying in the first place.

                He prayed with his eyes open though because he cared deeply about how other people perceived him. The last thing he would have wanted someone to think while he was praying and fearing for his life, was to think that he was praying because he was deeply afraid for his life. This did not make sense but many things in life do not make sense. Well, perhaps it did. It had been agreed upon by any number of people and even proven in studies that flying was considerably safer than driving. And yet, as everyone knew, the terrifying thing about flying was the loss of autonomy, the breaking down of the illusive barriers that are very much a part of the modern post-enlightenment individual, which suggest invulnerability and control, mastery over the world. No one could possibly, in his mind, feel like a master over that which he had no control. Flying was magic, plain and simple, and so he’d use his magic to combat it.

                When he was much younger, his grandfather, an inveterate alcoholic, had told him a story about the stars. The story was about a boy who wished to be taken to the stars. His grandfather was a gregarious drunk with extremely steady hands. H was always reminded of a bullfrog when he thought of his grandfather, swimming through whiskey colored streams. When he told stories, he’d rock back and forth in an old chair with his glass of whiskey held loosely in his left hand. His grandparents live in an old house in the country where the wind often carried the scent of honeysuckle and the stars were feathers on the dark bird of the sky.

                H generally sat at his grandfather’s feet when the story was being told. He was often mesmerized by the whiskey, waiting for the glass to fall and shatter in a thousand pieces. Sometimes, while his grandfather spoke, H would look up into the sky to try and make sense of the riot of stars. He knew that people had named them, but he knew they were too distant to be properly named. They were celestial beings of another world, a better world. That was the gist of the grandfather’s story. The boy was granted his wish and went to live among the stars.

                The details of the story are unimportant. Rather, what was important was the feeling of awe that the story created in the child, sitting at his grandfather’s sweet amid the sickening smell of honeysuckle and the fetid odor of the stream. Beneath his grandfather’s voice was a cacophony of noise, crickets chirping, fireflies popping in and out of existence, and the hum of bottlenose flies. Like all stars eventually the boy who had gone to live amongst them burned out. And when he died, he sent a thousand of his offspring whirring back towards earth. It was the grandfather’s contention that if they were still for long enough, eventually they’d see one of his children burning across the night sky.

                And H remembers the smell of his grandfather’s shoes, oiled leather and the strong whiskey, with diminishing ice floating in the glass. And though he knows that it can’t be true, in his mind he swears that they saw a shooting star every time his grandfather told the story. Stranger still is that when he asked his brother about these evenings in the country, the low blue sky and wood smoke, his brother claimed that all he recalled was their grandfather’s drinking. H’s brother insisted that most nights ended with their grandfather slurring about his time overseas before drifting into a fitful sleep.