42 CARTER
C ARTER
When I was a boy, my mother would sometimes take us to a particular spot in the eastern Dales where the meadows were high and wide and the towns were far, allowing the night sky to show a blanket of a thousand stars, free from the light pollution of nearby cities.
We would take blankets and food and a lantern and stay out well past midnight into the darkest hours of night on a kind of mini camping adventure that was pretty much the best thing ever for a boy of that age.
On one such night in May, just before my ninth birthday, Jacob and I sat together on a blanket, just the two of us, and saw something unusual.
It was a remarkably clear night, and as we looked up at the crescent moon, we saw what appeared to be a star that sat in front of the moon.
Not a shooting star or a meteor, but a singular star, twinkling and stable.
Both of us were startled by the inexplicable strangeness of it, and I remember the frisson of excitement that coursed through me at having witnessed something unexplainable by science.
That same night as a boy, as I lay awake thinking of it, I remember a particular series of notes and a melody coming into my mind, the beginnings of my first song, just as I was falling asleep.
I saw the motion of it, the spaces between the notes and the story they were trying to tell, a lullaby of sorts.
I hummed it aloud into the dark, allowing it to unfold from the mysterious place where such things come from.
Years later, I would turn that night into the name of a band and then eventually the melody into a song, while sitting on the dock of a bay, falling in love with that same girl.
She was always so captivated by the way that song had sounded familiar.
“I swear I used to hear it in my dreams from the time I was little,” she would say in wonderment.
The magic of that starry crescent-moon night in May, long ago, somehow linking us across space and time in a way we could never explain.
We had been planning to move to London together that day she left me in New York. Our whole life in front of us. What she never knew, though, was that that spot in the eastern Dales, beneath a waxing moon, was the place where I had been planning to ask her to marry me that spring.
Sometimes the paths of stars don’t cross, after all. After that, I stopped looking up at the sky for a long time. We released the album later that year, with the song that was once captured on a nighttime breeze and sent across an ocean, “An Appearance of Light,” as the final track.