Road to Bountiful by Donald S. Smurthwaite Page B

enough stars for one night.”
    Levi doesn’t move. His head cranes upward, his gaze intent. A half-minute of portentous silence slips by before he finally speaks. “Just another minute, Uncle Loyal.” And then, “This is just starting to make sense.”
    The sense of pace. The peace of slowness. He is beginning to understand lessons that the plains had taught me. I again join him in looking up.
    It was then that a silvery white dot of light burst across the sky, moving impossibly fast, producing no sound, making a wild ride across the sky. It seemed to make everything on earth stand still and fall to silence and seem small. We had seen a shooting star, nothing uncommon in North Dakota at that time of the year, but apparently something rarely seen by my great-nephew.
    “Wow. Whoa. Wow. Dude, did you see that?”
    “I did. Yes.”
    “I can’t ever remember seeing anything like that. That was awesome.”
    “It was spectacular.”
    “I’ve never, never seen one like that. Not at all.”
    Slowly, he rises from the car hood, our time gazing at stars now capped by an event most memorable. The air smells both sweet and musty. We open the car doors and slide into our places in the front seat.
    Levi starts the engine but does not put the car into gear. In the dim light that comes from the dashboard, he turns toward me.
    “I wonder what it’s like to be a shooting star,” he says.
    An unusual thought, certainly. But I am happy to hear it. “I think you already know something of it.”
    He puts the car in gear and presses his foot on the accelerator, and we merge back on to the highway. “Well, we’d better try to make up for lost time. We have a long bit of road ahead of us,” he says, and the red car moves down the highway at a faster clip.
    “I’m enjoying this. All of it. The trip. The drive. The company.” My words come back to him in the humid air, tinged with the peculiar fragrance of dampened corn, near to ripe. I’m not quite sure of the implications, not understanding the idiom of the young, but I enjoy being called “dude” by him. The tone of our trip is changing. It is becoming a journey. And I think this: we have much to learn from each other.
    A few more seconds pass before I have the perspicacity to add, “And we have many miles to go.”

Chapter Ten
    And I Worried about Uncle Loyal Being the One Who Was Nuts
    I told Uncle Loyal, sure, let’s pull onto the driveway and look at the stars. The little voice whined in my mind: Remember the fat paycheck at the end of the road, Levi. When you waste time, you waste money. That was Levi the man of business speaking. But Levi the human being fortunately took control. I enjoyed the experience. Give him credit. The old fellow did seem to know tons about the stars. Did you know that Orpheus played the harp really well? The guy must have rocked.
    So there we were on the side of the road, spread out on the car hood, looking up at the stars, and Uncle Loyal was pointing out some constellations, and I was thinking, I can’t see much, and I’ve probably had about all I can handle in the way of Dakota culture for one afternoon and evening . Next thing we’d be stopping at the Cornfields of Mystery, or Wheat fields of Wonder, or some other such roadside attraction, and I’d be buying postcards to send to my friends and let them know what an amazing time I was having.
    Then I started to see the patterns, and things began to click for me. So much to see and understand, and I hadn’t taken the time to notice. Uncle Loyal had already talked about the slowness of all things, two or three times, and honestly, I thought it was just one of those things nice old guys say. But I now get part of what he means: you do see more when you’re going slow. Then I saw the star, the shooting star, and for a moment I forgot about where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, what was important to me. I even forgot about the money I was earning on this quick trip. The shooting