Show Me the Stars

One of my favorite childhood memories is my stepdad waking us in the middle of the night because something was happening in the sky.

A lunar eclipse. A meteor shower. Something above us that Brian had decided was worth getting out of bed for.

We would stumble outside sleepy-eyed while he stood there fully awake. He worked an evening shift in those years and usually got home around midnight, so the middle of the night belonged to him in a way it never belonged to us. He would point toward the moon or the stars and explain what we were looking at, and he talked about the sky with such authority that I assumed he had studied it all his life.

He hadn't. Brian was a mechanic who later went to work with chemicals in a plant. He never took a class in astronomy. He was simply interested, and more than that, he paid attention.

Years later I told my daughter, Charlotte, about those nights. I told her that being pulled from a warm bed to squint at the sky had somehow become one of my favorite memories of being a kid.

"Will you do that for me, Momma?"

Of course, I said.

Then I didn't.

For days she asked when it was going to happen. When would I wake her up? When would we walk out in our pajamas onto the terrace beneath our building and look at the sky while everyone else slept? I kept promising we would.

Then my brother and his wife had their first baby, and we traveled to Aurora to meet their new bundle of joy. Phil and I had to leave almost immediately afterward for a work trip, so Charlotte stayed behind with my mom and Brian.

Somewhere on the road, I remembered the promise I hadn't kept. I texted Brian, told him what Charlotte had been asking for, and suggested he take her outside while she was there, the way he had once taken us.

His reply surprised me.

"Haha. Gotcha. I hope she don't get mad at me like you guys did."

I don't remember being mad. Apparently, he does.

I asked whether anything would be happening in the sky while Charlotte was there. I knew he would know. At first he thought there was a lunar eclipse. Then he corrected himself.

"No, I got my dates wrong, but I'm in luck. We have a meteor shower them nights."

I told him that was perfect and hoped for clear skies.

"That will be perfect," he wrote. "It will be a secret."

I said I couldn't wait to hear what she thought.

"Could go either way. Mad cuz I got her up, or excited."

He knows us pretty well.

The right way and the wrong way

Brian and I probably remember a lot of my childhood differently.

As a kid, I knew him as the person who cared about rules. Things had a right way and a wrong way. You arrived when you said you would. You took care of what belonged to you. You did what you said you were going to do. He was cautious, exact, punctual. Sometimes maddeningly so. He never raised his voice, but you knew when he meant something. He wasn't dramatic, and he wasn't especially sentimental.

He wouldn't say. He would do.

He was also adamant that you turn off the lights when you leave a room. It occurs to me now that the man who spent his evenings switching off every light we left burning was the same one getting us out of bed to go look at them.

As a child I experienced all of that as rigidity. As an adult, I recognize it as dependability. Maybe that's what time does to certain memories. It doesn't rewrite them so much as reveal what we weren't old enough to understand the first time.

Ask me about those nights now and I can't tell you much about the sky. I couldn't say which meteor shower we saw, or which eclipse, or even which year. The stars have blurred together. The man pointing at them hasn't.

When you're a child, you spend so much time looking where someone points that you never think to notice the person doing the pointing.

The one that holds still

Every light in the night sky moves. Over the course of a night the whole sky wheels overhead, rising and setting like everything else. Except one. One star holds its place while everything turns around it, and for most of human history, people found their way home by it. Not because it's the brightest. Because it's always exactly where they left it.

I won't explain the metaphor. Brian would tell me to get to the point.

So, the point. Some night very soon, in a backyard in Aurora, my daughter is going to be shaken gently awake by her Pop Pop and led outside in her pajamas to watch pieces of a comet burn up over Missouri. She doesn't know it's coming. It will be a secret, like he said.

I don't know how this story ends yet. Maybe she'll be thrilled. Maybe she'll be mad because he got her up. Maybe thirty years from now, she and Brian will remember the whole night completely differently, and they can argue about it the way he and I do.

We spend our days at Seville Home helping families make beautiful rooms, and I believe in that work completely. But some of what makes a home doesn't happen in any room. It happens at two in the morning, in pajamas, in the wet grass of a backyard in Aurora.

Charlotte may remember the stars. She may remember being tired. She may only remember being annoyed. But someday, I think, she'll understand what took me thirty years to see.

Someone who loved her made sure she looked up.