When you wish upon a star, keep it to yourself

A full view of the heavens is hard to come by in our neighborhood. Rooflines, streetlights and an abundance of tall trees narrow our viewing window down to only a small gap through which one might spot something extraordinary. That made it even more of a surprise and delight when my wife caught a brilliant meteor shooting through the night sky as we carried groceries from the car to the house one crisp, clear evening last week.

“Oh my gosh!” she shouted. “Did you see that shooting star?”

I had not, which is not entirely surprising because the nature of shooting stars is one of breathtaking brevity. Now you see it; now you don’t. One never really gets a chance to say, “Oh look, it’s a shooting star!” The event is over before the words even leave your lips, in a moment faster than magic. It’s that fleeting sense of enchantment that compels us to wish upon a star.

“Hang on a minute. I need to make a wish,” Kristin said, and I, of course, honored this command while standing there in the cold, arms dripping with grocery bags. Her wish took a while.

“I feel like you could have made that same wish in about a thousand fewer words,” I said.

“You don’t know,” she snorted. “Anyway, how would you know what I was wishing for?”

Kristin and I have been turning the same door key, setting the same alarm clock and finishing each other’s sentences for 3 1/2 decades. I knew for sure, in that moment exactly, what she wished for. She might as well have said it out loud. Of course, to have said it out loud would have removed the magic and negated the wish. Everybody knows that, right?

The next day Kristin was relating the event to our daughter Charlotte in exquisite detail.

“And so I told your dad, ‘Wait, I need to make a wish.’ So then I wished for … ”

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” I shouted. “What are you doing? You can’t reveal your wish.”

“Why not?” Kristin said. “It’s not a birthday wish. Only birthday wishes are secret.”

“Wait, what?” I laughed. “Could you please repeat that because it really sounds like you’re making up your own superstitions as you go.”

Charlotte, having been raised in a home steeped in such meaningless superstition, cried foul as well.

“Geez, Mom! Everyone knows you’re not supposed to tell anybody what you’ve wished for!”

I was flummoxed. You think you know a person, and then they unleash this type of craziness. The discussion quickly devolved into a 20-minute debate over proper wish-making protocol. Such arguments — ones where Kristin is on one side and I am on the other, correct side — rarely see a peaceful resolution.

All argument aside, the wish in question was an intensely important one, one that deserved careful and proper treatment. That is why, on my ride home from work the very next evening, I detoured off the road onto a lonely field lane where I climbed off my bike, sprawled out on the dead grass and stared up at the full canopy of sky for as long as it took to finally catch a shooting star of my own. You can bet I’ll never tell what I wished for.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. May all of your wishes come true this holiday season.

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.