pursuing the perseids

my car wouldn't start on saturday morning because i still haven't learned just how low i can go in this new-to-me car. when i turned the ignition, the car computer warned me i was low on coolant, but i checked and all the fluids were fine. (it also told me the night before that i had 30 miles left to an empty tank, so evidently it lies.) i walked up to the gas station just a couple blocks up from here, glad it was so close since it was about 100 degrees by that point. they lent me a container for gas, i pumped 2 gallons into it, and after toting it back to the driveway and pouring it in, voilà, the car purred to a start.

then last night around 11:30, when i was reading the same paragraph over and over, too distracted to absorb it, i realized i'd been thinking earlier in the day that i wanted to watch the perseid meteor shower. i'm sort of at the northern edge of town here, but it's still a village-style new urban development with low public lighting and cars driving around. so i threw on some jeans and a fleece even though i thought it might be too hot, and drove up to the gas station again. they'd actually turned off the pumps. how weird is that? isn't it a good thing to make debit/credit card sales when no one even has to be working there? again: GAH, colorado.

i figured i'd drive just far enough away where, even if i did go below the magic line on the gauge and run out of gas again, i'd still be able to walk home. so i went north, and turned off on the first graded gravel road i saw, and it led down about a half-mile to a private ranch road with a little parking lot just before it leading onto open space. there was already some guy in the parking lot lying on the hood of his car, so i copied him and caught my first falling star streaking across half the sky. turned out to be the best one i saw all night. i stayed long enough to have an annoyingly talkative couple show up, do the blah-blah-blah and leave again; to outlast the other guy; get nine mosquito bites (no west nile virus please, no west nile virus please – sing it with me!); and see one more really good meteor to end my night, just before a last set of headlights crunched down the ranch road.

and – no long, dark walk home. though that would've been OK, under such a falling-starry sky.