Star chasers

Last night, my husband and I did what we never ever do, not to go to a show, or a club, or a bar, or a movie. We left the house at 10 o'clock and returned past 11:30 p.m.

We went out hunting for Perseids.

NASA had predicted that this year's meteor shower, the debris of the Swift-Tuttle Comet, would be "a great show," with one or two Perseids shooting through the Earth's atmosphere per minute at its peak (which, granted, was not to be until 1 a.m.). Those-who-know here said the hour between 10 and 11 p.m. would be good, too.

Encouraged by such promising expectations, we packed ourselves and Rusty into my car and drove out to the countryside, about 30 minutes away, as far as we could get from the nearby cities' light pollution.

My husband found the perfect spot in front of a very large corn field. We parked near a working oil rig, got out of the car in the almost-total darkness and stared up at the sky. I was psyched for quite the light show and tried not to mind the oil smell.

Rusty wondered what the heck we were doing.

Well, we spent about 12 minutes craning our necks and looking committedly up into the sky and turning on our axis to scan the entire Heavens every minute or so (we must have been quite the sight if there had been anyone to see us) but there was not one shooting star anywhere.

Nada, zero, zilch. A few tiny, little-red-lighted airplanes cruising the sky but not a single shooting star.

"C'mon," I whined to the Heavens. "Just one, OK? Just a little single one."

"The conditions are not good," my scientifically minded husband noted. "There are a lot of clouds and there's a lot of glare still. You see how much we can see of each other?"

He said we needed to be patient but standing in the middle of nowhere in near total darkness is as anathema to my city-girl nature as you can get so I was becoming uneasy quite rapidly. My unease ironically increased after a Good Samaritan, who went speeding by us on the lonely country road we had turned off from, did an about-face to nicely ask if we needed help.

What if some crazy red necks out on a joy ride decide to ruin our star-chasing night just for fun?, wondered the city-girl in me.

So, much to my husband's disappointment, we got in the car at about 11:15 p.m. and back on the road, heading home sans a single Perseid. I was feeling rather stupid for suggesting that this would be a good idea in the first place.

And that's when it happened.

A clear-as-day fireball shot through the murky, glare-lit sky right in front of us, shearing the dark like a sudden memory, and turning me into a giggling, silly child.

"We got one! We got one!" I exclaimed and my husband smiled.

OK, so this wasn't like when, about 13 years ago, my husband and I were in our then-home in the hills of Guaynabo, sitting outside on our hammock hanging in the long balcony, listening to the BBC on his short-wave radio. That night we saw more than half a dozen Perseids shoot through the blackened sky.

Or like the time, when I was a child, that my father stopped our car in the scraggy hills of Guánica and we got out to see the Heavens in display, sparkling like a large city seen from an airplane with a gazillion, shimmering points of light.

No, last night wasn't like any of those great memories. But I know that this one shinning Perseid blazed itself into our memory forever, just the same.