I have a weird relationship with shooting stars. Every time I see one (at least over the past few years) something significant happens in my life. When Bruno and I started getting serious we went on a trip to Arizona with his parents. This was my first time meeting them and kind of a test to see how I would survive in the family. The last night we were there we saw a shooting star and then the next day Bruno's mom made a joke about us getting married. It was embarrassing and far from my mind at the time. I was dumb and didn't realize the significance of this family trip.
A few weeks later, Bruno asked me to marry him. When we were sitting in our favorite park, getting all teary eyed over our love (hee hee), we saw another shooting star. Then a cracked out crazy lady accosted us and we had to run for our lives. But that's a whole other story.
Bruno left for Italy a few days after we announced our engagement and was gone for four whole months. I knew all along that he would be leaving but it was one of the most difficult times of my life. We talked on the phone every day (and went broke doing it!) and he came home two months into his trip for a short visit. On his last full day home we snuck off to the courthouse and got married. That night, we sat out on the balcony of our hotel room and witnessed another shooting star. Then Bruno went back to Italy the next day.
While he was gone I busied myself with work and planning our "real" wedding. (We still went ahead with the official shindig so that I could wear the white dress and sip champagne.) Up until that point, my articles received a fairly good response from the readers but I had yet to really piss anyone off (my mark of a good article!). I got an assignment to write about a particularly controversial issue (aspartame) and went to town with it. To this day I consider it one of my very best. It was so good that I received threatening letters from Monsanto, a gigantic corporation that is responsible for making a huge chunk of products that are single handedly destroying the environment. I also received more reader mail from that one article than all of my others combined. It was awesome! What in the hell does any of this have to do with shooting stars??? The cover of the magazine issue that the story appeared in was a painting of a father and son watching a star shoot across the evening sky.
Of course you can guess what we saw the night of our official wedding party. Again, from another hotel balcony. But that was the day after Christmas last year and I haven't seen another shooting star since... Until Halloween night. When I saw it I nearly tripped over myself running inside to tell Bruno. The significance? It was smack dab in the middle of my "fertile" days. I don't know if I'm pregnant and won't know for another week and a half, but... I know I'm jinxing this by writing about it, but I want a record of this so that if I do get pregnant I can do the "I told you so!" dance.
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