A Little Story About Meteors
November 2024
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG BOY growing up in Southern California, maybe six or seven years old, my dad enrolled me in a week-long YMCA summer day program. At that age, I was cripplingly shy and insecure. I knew no one and feared everyone at the camp. I was terrible at the athletic activities and was sure everyone would have just as soon drowned me in the nearest drainage culvert. I think I probably kind of clung to the instructors. The final day of the camp included a one-night sleepover in the mountains. I’m sure this was the first time I’d ever been away from home for a night. I was terrified. My dad was in many respects not one for social norms, and though we were not poor, I was the only boy there without a proper sleeping bag. Instead, my dad sent along an old wool Army surplus blanket that also happened to have a few holes in it. I was embarrassed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the chaperones gave it the side-eye, as well.
We arrived in the late afternoon and settled in. Despite my anxiety at the camp as a whole, I don’t have memories of feeling anxious or homesick, which is surprising, but I spent the first three years of my life living in the mountains, and that may have helped. It was on that trip that I also discovered the amazing culinary treat known as sloppy joes.
As evening descended, all the boys rolled out their sleeping bags, and I crawled under my itchy blanket. I think I might have semi-befriended another boy there and slept next to him.
Now THAT’s a meteor!
In the middle of the night, I awoke to an amazing meteor shower. I don’t know if I had ever seen an actual meteor before, so I was really stunned. They were frequent, as in one every few seconds. Some were dim, and others very bright as they flashed across the sky in all directions. At one point, a very large meteor passed overhead. It was so large that I could make out craters and pitting as it tumbled across the sky. I even thought I’d heard a hissing sound. Then the shower ended, and I went back to sleep.
I told my meteor story many times. At some point, I learned about the Leonids, an annual meteor shower that can produce dazzling meteor storms. The 1966 Leonids was reported as being particularly spectacular, and I decided that must have been what I saw.
It wasn’t until I was in college, once again telling the story to friends, that I suddenly realized problems with what I was reporting. My memories of it were, and still are, vivid, but the fact is that meteors do not fly in all directions during a shower. They emanate from a central point and radiate out from there. The Leonids are called that because the appear to emanate from the constellation of Leo. Also, the timing of the 1966 Leonid shower did not quite add up. But most damning was that tumbling, hissing, cratered meteor. Anyone witnessing something like that would moments later witness a dinosaur extinction class of event. Clearly, as a boy on that mountain top, I had been dreaming.
I think I’ve only had one or two other dreams in my life that took place in the exact setting where I went to sleep, the surroundings identical to waking reality — the sort of dream that a young boy might have trouble distinguishing from reality. But I do ponder how my young mind conjured up that vivid burning meteor imagery. I’ve had an interest in space from a young age, but I don’t think I had been studying meteors in depth at the time. It kind of makes you wonder about the concept of archetypal images that may or may not be coded right into our DNA.
It’s also one of the things that has made me question the validity of memories in general. I don’t put a lot of stock in “eyewitness testimony” anymore. I think our minds manipulate our memories in many ways all the time, sometimes to the point that they no longer resemble actual events. I can think of a couple of vivid visual memories of scenes from TV shows and movies that upon rewatching conflict with what I’m seeing on the screen. Like dialogue spoken in a different scene than what I remember. Or the actors speaking the dialog are not the actors I remembered. Memories are weird. Dreams, too.
Or, maybe my brain is weirder than most.
