Here is why I love Au Revoir Simone so much, and stars and wide open night skies. Their songs makes me feel like a gawky 14 year-old with a wicked crush. One who just met a fellow (though Canadian, but female - so cuter!) gawky 14 year-old while floating in a bright yellow, fiberglass canoe on Little Beaver Lake, three hours north of Napanee, Ontario late at night as the Aurora Borealis hangs its irridescent curtain across the northern sky. No one in my family seemed to think it was a big deal. They went to bed after the sky began to flicker and wave. I climbed into my sleeping bag on the screened in porch, and watched the sky slowly explode. After about half an hour I snuck down the white painted dock steps and put my feet in the still warm lake water. Eventually the persistent rhythm of the lake on the tied up canoe started taunting me, and even though I have an odd fear of being on open water at night (thanks Steven Spielberg!), I paddled out into the darkness - alone - to lay back and watch the heavens, and float about wherever the water took me.

After a little while I heard a distant, gentle lapping distinct from my own watery night sounds lapping next to my head as it lay on the hull of the canoe. I sat up and saw an empty wooden rowboat drifting my way. As I watched the boat and then the sky, then the boat again, someone sat up. Someone with blondish hair in a yellow one piece bathing suit and a worn, flimsy beach towel over her shoulders. She paddled over to me, grabbed the side of my boat as I grabbed hers. “Isn’t it amazing,” was all she said through a silvery metallic smile. It was. And for more reasons than just solar winds in the ionisphere.

We eventually were holding each other’s hands as well as our boats, and talking about all kinds of “amazing” things. We slowly and reluctantly drifted apart after the sky had toned itself down to a gentle flicker. Paddling homeward with looks and smiles over our shoulders as we receded from one another’s view into and the night distance was painful and wonderful. No, no kiss, but it may have been better in hind sight. I think? I was sad and happy all night long.

We met the next day at the swimming hole, and then when we had been sufficiently dried on the dock in the sun, we put on our socks and did power slides on the frictionless floor of the dance hall. We never kissed all summer, but we did hold hands a few more times before she returned to Ajax (a real city in Ontario), and I to Akron, OH. I never saw her again, but I think about her on summer nights just for a few seconds when we get away to Ocean Grove, NJ, or to my Father’s farm in WV or even up in Prospect Park - places where the ground lights fade away and the skies open up for you. I wonder if she does the same?