Shooting Star

I work in a retail setting, open to the public. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that our overhead music is terrible. Mariah Carey, 70s disco....um, Mariah Carey. etc. Anyway, the pharmacy where I work, located at the extreme rear of the store, has its own radio and more often than not it is tuned to a classic rock/alternative station. They do tend to play the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Under The Bridge" waaay to much, but it's still better than Mariah Carey.

Two nights ago as I stood counting pills, Bad Company's "Shooting Star" came on, and I smiled to myself quietly, lost in a memory of a friend I'd had who'd loved the song as much as I did and who often sang it aloud with me, using oversized kitchen utensils as microphones. We'd worked in the cafeteria of a local agricultural college, cooking for and serving the lunchtime students

We'd also loved to sing Del Shannon's "Runaway" in a similar manner, and had once received applause from a full table of studying students who had paused long enough to listen, enraptured, to my friend and I enthusiastically belting out the "wah-wah-wah's" in our 50s falsettos.

That memory, of course, led way to others. She'd been my best friend in the first years of the 1990s, my sister. We were inseperable. We spent countless weekends wandering up and down South Street, Philadelphia, buying carnations for the homeless, haunting the Garden of Enchantment, an incense soaked magical place that sold chunks of quartz, tarot cards and paintings by Susan Seddon Boulet. As a matter of fact, I bought one of Susie's posters for my friends, who was obsessed with white tigers. She was redecorating her bedroom at the time and it made the perfect centerpiece, hung just above her bed.

I helped her redecorate that room, pulling down shelves, slapping on paint, hanging everything back up just so. I slept in that room a lot, too - frequent slumber parties for two took place after returning from Philly, laden down with shopping bags, reeking of cheesesteaks, our wilting carnations laid carefully across the kitchen table.  Once, late one winter night, the first snowstorm of the season struck and, unable to resist, we snuck out of the house at midnight, holding hands and running through the still falling snow, stopping just long enough to make snowmen and spell out the names of our current boyfriends with our feet in the heavy white powder.

Another night, giggling at our own daring, we dressed ourselves in all black and snuck out once again, armed with a bottle of black spray paint each. You see, her boyfriend (later to become her husband) had drunkenly spray painted an obscene image on the blank, gray wall of a local underpass when he was younger and drunker. She hated seeing it every day as the bus carried her past it on her way to work and home again. So we fixed it, blacking out the pornographic image as best we could. In retrospect, we should have used gray so it would blend in with the rest of the wall. Our massive black patch stayed in place for about a month before the city painted over it again, erasing all traces of our handiwork.

And then...something happened. I'll be damned if I can remember what. Probably my fragile little ego taking a hit when my best friend decided she preferred being with her boyfriend. I honestly don't know. We had a fight, I'm pretty sure. It ended when I packed up everything I'd ever borrowed from her and left it sitting on her back stoop. I never spoke to her again. Goddamn it, what the hell did we fight about? It seemed so all important at the time. I remember being angry and devastated and feeling betrayed in that dramatic, soap opera-y way that only a 21 year old can feel. I moved on to another job, made new friends, fucked those relationships up too. I left Pennsylvania, moved to Indiana, California, then back to the East, settling in Rhode Island. I thought about her every once in a great while, but never with such clarity as I did the other night,when Bad Company's "Shooting Star" came on the radio. That song was a key in the flood gates, and I remembered everything about my friendship with her, except for the way it ended. I came home and plugged my old friend's name into the Facebook search engine, wondering where she'd gone, where life had taken her, if she was happy.

So, she's been gone for two years. I was too late.

I'm sorry, Shani. I was stupid and wrong and too young to appreciate true friendship.

And I still remember that day we started to sing "Shooting Star" and I wanted to skip to the last verse about Johnny's death. You refused. "Why do you always want to sing the sad part?" you asked me with a half smile.

I don't know, Shani. But you were right. I shouldn't have been in such a hurry to skip to the sad part, because now here it is, and I can't go back to the beginning and start over and make it right this time. I'm sorry.

Johnny's life passed him
By like a warm summer day
If you listen to the wind
You can still hear him play

Don't you know

Don't you know
That you are a shooting star, (don't you know, don't you know)
Don't you know that you are
A shooting star
And all the world will love you
Just as long, as long as you are?