Chapter 28
The Perseids
When I was little, I used to lie in the field in front of our old house with my dad and watch the miracle of the Perseids. It was a magic moment: the warm summer night, the scent of corn and soybeans, the silence out there in the middle of nowhere, the company, which couldn’t have been better.
“Look, there goes another one!” I shouted. “Did you see? It was huge. Like, giant. I don’t think that was a shooting star. I think it was a comet.”
“Maybe. I mean, everything we’re looking at, actually, is what’s left from the Swift–Tuttle comet. Little stones that enter the atmosphere and light up.”
I grabbed the binoculars and looked again.
My father had been teaching me the constellations and the legends behind them and everything else he knew about the immensity of the universe.
On our little patch of Earth, knowing we formed part of a galaxy called the Milky Way with a diameter of a hundred thousand light-years, with all kinds of solar systems inside, I felt at peace, remembered I was alive, thought about how my problems and the problems of so many other eight-year-old kids out there were insignificant in comparison.
I wanted to stay there forever, sheltered in the darkness, with the meteors raining above me.
But time…time kept passing.