Monday

I've been on a health kick lately. It's been coming for a while: I stopped drinking cola and eating fried food in March. I started eating more salads. Lately, I've been cutting out as much arbitrary sugar and salt as possible, and I'm way down on cheese and caffeine intake. At the grocery store we buy large quantities of fresh fruit, which we leave on the kitchen bar: fresh cherries, nectarines, red and black plums, pears and peaches where I can snack on them rather than leftover pizza or another dollar's worth of three-minute Korean Styrofoam cup ramen. I've been popping Clementine mandarin sections all day. I have also begun jogging up stairs and taking fast, late-evening walks around the cemetery behind Oakwood.* At night it's breezy, and these walks are rather addictive. Last night, on just such a walk, something odd happened. Isn't it nice when confusion just hands you a simile? In the sky I saw a shooting star, streaking along at what must have been bewildering speed at shooting-star distance; dimmed from shooting-star brightness by the Falls Church city lights. Only, that's the simile. It was really far closer and far dimmer, but I had to follow its trajectory beneath the horizon before I realized how close it was. It was moving as fast as a meteorite looks to be moving, but at a bewildering six-foot distance. When it augured full throttle into a tasteful little bush just off the path, it crashed loudly and the plant shuddered like it had been hit with a baseball. I watched the bush for a minute, but nothing else happened. It was traveling too straight for a bat and too heavy for a cicada. I don't know what it was, but it was reminiscent of a shooting star. [Cavin]