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Brown Mountain Lights: Boone, North Carolina The star light show was in the evening. Everything else was following. The university was aspark with hearty handshakes from one schoolboy to another and, laughing at one another’s quilted slacks, they did stop and shared a pipe, and the glass did fill dark with their smoke, and the schoolgirls did curtsy in their loose dresses, to return soon home and cook sweet and savory seaweed rolls that this night would be most enjoyed before the star light show at the gathering. Meanwhile even the most photophilic of students stayed indoors and read their copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Plato’s Republic atop their soft cushioned seats in the library, near the windows where the sun might still spy their beardless faces. The boy-remembered thanked his Yale-graduated-ring-giver after the most scholarly of lectures, the dialogue favoring ideas of race, class and gender, and he made to leave the classroom close behind the fleeced herd already abroad in the last hours of daylight, the chill to the air tyrannical. He made light of the sun and wind and went to dwell awhile in a forested house on the hill, atop that street called Hill Street. There the boys did sweeten that harsh air with a most languid drumming and strumming, some sharing a glass of mead and others a pipe to stall. The boy-remembered began discoursing on some tales he knew and the pipe and the mead made many rounds while the sun sank through the floor and everything was illuminated in the boy-remembered’s words. When dinner did fill their hollow stomachs, the girls laughing as the boys belched and made faces at the other boys, the many did move into their metal vehicles and ride to a most commonly deserted mountain stretch not many miles down the parkway. The boy-remembered and his companions, many barely sighted on the light of day, and more from beside their hearths did quest the night, to find this place which had been calling. Heavy quilts lay soft the ground, their bodies atop and under the many layers. On the hard rock did the echo of the sky trickle, most mystical incantations of light from the heavens on high, and new songs the boy remembered did write, to match the fruit in their hands and the beauty of the night sky.