To Wish Upon a Star
Evening cast long shadows across the old Starlite Motel, with its soaring pillars like airplane tailfins and the streamlined bands of the roofline which once would've been lit with neon to match the sign in front. Googie, they'd called that style of architecture, relic of a time when people still believed in a wide-open future full of rockets to the Moon and Mars, of cities in orbit and ordinary families raising their children as spacefarers.
There, above the red starburst atop the sign, a white gleam of light in the darkening sky -- the first star of the night. Memory returns of childhood lore, of a time when those hopes and dreams were still alive:
Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might, Have the wish I wish tonight.
And the wish comes easy to my mind, just as it comes whenever I see the old images of the moonshots, the footage of the mighty Saturn V rockets rising into the sky on that grand voyage that we thought was the beginning of the realization of the dreams of all that Golden Age science fiction. Oh gods, how I wish for it to be Gus in the commander's seat. He deserves so much better than dying in a fire born of haste and sloppy engineering.
That is the wish I wish tonight
Watercolor artwork and text copyright 2014 by Leigh Kimmel, all rights reserved.
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