Pitching stars

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Last night I went stargazing and camping with some friends up on top the hill at the Tracking Station in Macqueripe. Although we had set up the tent upon arrival, we ended up sleeping outside on the tarpaulin, under the open sky. It was not as cold as I've experienced in the past being up there at night, but it was still nippy. Thank goodness for the sleeping bag.

One of my friends had brought his guitar, so we were singing some of our songs under the stars. I sang my song "Infinite", because the first line is: "I want to be the stars in your eyes ..." (apt for the setting).

Our guitar renditions attracted a little boy who eagerly crossed the dark field to be with us. "I play guitar," he announced. "I"m going to lessons." We handed the guitar over to him, he played some chords of popular songs, then invited his little sister and teen brother to come across as well. The teen brother, who was quite a good guitarist, played some popular songs and he and his siblings stayed with us until after midnight.

Every now and then someone would cry out: "A shooting star!" and Mitch, one of our friends, would say: "Don't call it a shooting star. That sounds too violent. It's a pitching star."

I was perhaps the only person who hadn't seen any yet. The little girl (who had seen quite a few) and I lay on our backs, looking up, waiting for more. Eventually I saw two, almost immediately one after the other. I made the same wish for both. These stars weren't the falling kind. They were the kind that zoom horizontally across the sky ... kind of like a huge Cosmic Being 'pitching' stars instead of marbles.