The Perseid meteor shower happens every summer from mid-July to mid-August. At its peak you can see as many as 60 shooting stars per hour between midnight and dawn, especially in rural areas of north America where light pollution doesn't wash away the dark.
The meteorites are actually small dust particles left behind from the tail of the Swift-Tuttle Comet which comes around about every 133 years. The shower is called the Perseid because the meteorites look like they are coming out of the constellation Perseus, the Greek god known for his proficiency at killing monsters.
Seeing a shooting star every 60 seconds in one evening is pretty awesome so, when Charlie and I said we were going to watch the meteor shower, my Grandparents didn't think anything of it. We had already filled our two backpacks with a blanket, a bottle of Grandpa's homemade Concord grape wine, some swiss cheese and crackers, a Hershey's Special dark chocolate bar, a bottle of spring water, and a couple of jelly glasses. We threw in some Raid for the mosquitos and headed out to the north pasture where the only light came from the stars and the moon.
Until that summer, I had never heard of the Perseid.
I was a 20-year-old virgin, and it was the summer between my sophomore and junior years in the local college where I was majoring in American Lit and creative writing. My grandparents were getting too old to manage all the work required by their little farm so they offered to pay for a semester of my tuition if I would spend the summer with them helping with chores and whatever required heavy lifting.
Mostly that amounted to days of boredom, working on my tan and reading, occasionally interrupted by hours of back breaking labor. Grandpa had an old John Deere tractor with an eight row planter but he was too old to lift the bags of seed corn and empty them into the planter, so I would walk behind him as he planted corn, picking up sticks and rocks and tossing them in a basket on the back of the tractor and about every five or six passes, he would pull up to an old wagon filled with bags of seed corn and I would refill the planter. In June I would walk up and down the rows of corn or soybean seedlings, hoeing the previous year's corn seedlings out of the beans and the bean seedlings out of the corn and the monster ragweed and thistle out of everything.
In July I helped grandma with her nearly planet size garden, hoeing, weeding, picking and sitting on the front porch, breaking mountains of string beans. In my spare time, I read or fished for blue gill and catfish in the farm ponds. Sometimes I plunked around with Grandpa's old .22 single shot rifle. Grandma showed me how to cook that summer: fried eggs, fried chicken, fried okra, fried catfish. If you see a pattern, here, it's because my Grandma believed that there was no food so good that it couldn't be improved by frying it in lard.
On 4th of July there was a big celebration in town and it was there that I met Charlie. Her real name was Cheryl but everyone called her Charlie because she was something of a tomboy, full of piss and vinegar, and able to do anything a man could do - rope, ride, and shoot as good as any man, Grandma would say. Don't even try to hit her fast ball, Grandpa would say.
As for me, all I saw when I looked at her was a tall, athletically built, freckle faced, redhead with hair down to the middle of her back, big but not monstrous breasts, and a mischievous, toothy grin that would melt your heart like butter in a blast furnace. She was a year older than me and her farm was next door to my grandparents' farm and five times bigger. When I say, next door I mean, only a half mile down the road, or a third of a mile across the pasture, around the cornfield, and through the woods.
She was a biz-ag (business agriculture) major at the big state university and she intended to take over the family farm when her parents decided to retire which, according to her, they couldn't wait to do as they had never had a vacation in their entire married life and they wanted, desperately, to see Florida.
From the moment my Grandma introduced me to Charlie, I was head over heels, in love. Just like in the movies with little birds flying around my head and everything. Not only was she beautiful and sassy and independent, she also liked the same movies, music, and books I did.
We hung out a lot together that summer, going to the Methodist church with her family and my grandparents and the Catholic church festival, fishing, exploring, riding horseback (her family owned a stable), talking about our hopes and dreams and the meaning of life, and going to those big raves that her friends, other farm kids in the area, would throw out in the middle of some pasture. Word would go out and people would show up with their tents and sleeping bags and coolers, boom boxes, and bags of weed. There would be a bonfire and lots of drinking and toking and dancing and necking and, well, who knew what went on in those tents. She would tell her parents and I would tell my grandparents that we were going to a campout, which wasn't, technically, a lie, and off we'd go.
Each time we went to one of those shindigs, I'd be filled with fantasies of losing my virginity. I don't know what Charlie was thinking about but it wasn't me losing my virginity.
Mostly, at those raves, our tent was filled with lots of making out and above-the-waist-outside-the-clothes groping. It was fun and hot but it was the cause of many a case of blue balls for this boy. Beyond that, my sexual experience that summer amounted to a whole lot of reading about sex, a whole lot of sexual fantasies, and a deep and intimate relationship with my right hand. No matter how often I tried to move things along, Charlie insisted that she wasn't ready to "go there again."
She had been in a long-term relationship with a guy she dated in high school, she said. He was her first and only and, after she had sex with him, he treated her badly, telling his friends about it, all of whom branded her a slut in the school and community. So, she was being really careful about sex. I was raised to be a gentleman so, one, I wanted to beat the crap out of the guy who treated her badly and, two, I honored her wishes and didn't pressure her. Also, I was madly in love with her and I couldn't bear the thought of someone hurting her and I definitely did not want to be one of those guys.
When we went fishing, together, it was our habit to bring along something to read. She usually brought a romance novel and I would bring a paperback crime novel as it was my life's ambition to be a writer of crime fiction, the next Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker, or Elmore Leonard. One week in late July, however, I had read through the books I'd checked out of the Carnegie library in town and Grandma wasn't going back to town again until Saturday. So, I snatched up Grandpa's dogeared copy of the Farmer's Almanac and tossed it into my backpack.
A couple of hours later we were sitting on a blanket in the shade, fishing deadline in a creek that ran through the two farms. We had eaten our lunch and were feeling lazy in the heat, reading and dozing, not caring whether we caught any fish or not and I stumbled across an article in the Almanac about the Perseid meteor shower.
It said that viewing would be best, if clouds allowed, the following week and that our location in the state would be one of the best viewing areas. "As many as ninety shooting stars an hour will be visible," the article said. I read it to Charlie and she said it sounded cool. Our north pasture sat on top of a hill, she said, and would be a perfect place for viewing what promised to be an awesome astral phenomenon.
So, we made a pact. Sunday night, we would hike up to the North Pasture with a blanket and some food and wine and a big can of mosquito repellant and watch one of the greatest shows that nature has ever put on - or, at least, that's what the Farmer's Almanac claimed.
It being August, we were both dressed in cut-off's and white t-shirts but hers were better than mine. Her cutoff jean shorts were loose and hot-pants short and showed off her ass to perfection. Round and hard with the bottoms of her butt cheeks peeking out of the legs. Her t-shirt was perfectly white and thin as tissue and the bra she wore beneath it was lacy and thin, as well. My cutoffs were, well, blue. And my t-shirt was white. That's about all I can say about them. I made up for my sorry clothes, however, hair bleached white in the sun and a body that was deeply tanned and well-muscled, from the farm work I'd done all summer.
