The phrase is “Beauty and magic are in the eye of the beholder.” Fifty years ago our family made the Houston to Boerne trip for week-ends with the larger family. We usually arrived after dark. One evening we took the exit from the freeway north to New Braunfels. A large empty field to the east of the curve was alive with the movement of fireflies. A small visionary voice said, “Ohh, look at the little stars.” Then an older brother’s tone of reason cut in. ‘Fireflies only blink if the temperature is over 50 degrees.” Both statements were correct. I thought of that evening after reading a short column about a yearly August happening. In my childhood it was the surprise magic appearance of a “shooting star,” a unsuspected burst that arched momentarily through the dark heavens.
The scientific voice says this mid-August delight is called by astronomers the Perseid meteor shower. Under the best conditions 50 to 100 flares of fast moving bits of ice, dust, or rock can be seen when the Earth moves through the debris trail of a comet or meteor. The heat generated by the friction between debris and molecules in the atmosphere creates the light. At least three times, I have been in situations where the frequency of spotting the flares would be more predictable. I have lain on a quilt in a pasture in West Texas listening to the rhythmical chomping of grass by two horses who whooshed air when they came too close to this strange object in their locale. Some of you at a much younger age sat in pajamas with me on a upper deck at Live Oak Ranch and asked where you were supposed to watch. The most elaborate viewing was a year when a number of unparalleled sightings was to occur. One of the teen nephews drove the red pickup truck down the road away from the light of the house windows. He may have even dragged a mattress out to put in the bed of the truck. Ten cousins and me (other wiser adults sat on the porch) sat, lay, and dozed while calling out, “There went one!” or the frustrated cry of, “I just missed it.”
The pages of the scientific discussion are not what we remember. It is the feeling of warm bodies huddled and the momentary light streaks that remain etched on our memory, Most events are explained by reason. We provide the magic in our reaction to whatever, from dry ice creating boiling water to cutting an apple crossways and seeing the star made by the seed. Delicate mushrooms push their way through the earth where none were the day before. My favorite is the child who answered why God made rainbows with “So angels had something to slide on.” Dawn gives shape each day to forms that look as if they have vanished in the night. It’s magic!
Daylight makes the hills and valleys stand out like the folds of a garment, clear as the imprint of a seal on clay.
Job 38:14
Let Me Tell Ya 