Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

Star Light, Star Bright

The Discipline of One

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Do you remember this:

 

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

Wish I may,

Wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

 

I said that every evening as a child. I loved it and the explicit instructions that went with it:

 

1.  Stop the minute you see the first star.

2.  Make a wish (only one).

3.  Say the invocation.

4.  Walk on, confident it will come true.

5.  Don’t tell anyone your wish. Ever!

 

I obeyed.

 

I remember one of my wishes. I remember it because I cheated.

 

It was 1958. I was at beautiful Cimarroncita Camp in northern New Mexico. I was twelve. I was in love with a boy at home. I really was. I know I was only twelve. But this was love, I promise you.

 

His name was George. Mainly he was gorgeous. Every girl in the 6th grade adored him. Also, he worked for his dad in the Cattle Yards outside of town which was kind of glamorous. Really.

 

We had ‘become boyfriend and girlfriend’ at a party on May 5th. That meant that he had taken my hand and walked me down the block and back to the party. I didn’t wash that hand for four days.

 

We then became ‘more so’ at the next party on May 17th, holding hands walking around the hostess’s back yard and standing under a poplar tree, kissing once. It was my first kiss. I swooned for weeks.

 

Then at my own party on June 5th, George and I left the terrace and the dancing and the automatic stack of (mostly Buddy Holly) 45 RPM records to “walk around the house,” stopping among spruce bushes to kiss again. We walked back to the terrace and danced, our interlude undetected.

 

After the party my friend Michelle spent the night with me. We waited. After my parents and big sister and twin brother had gone to bed, George and his friend Larry came to my bedroom window, managing heroically to get under and out from the spirea bushes bordering the house.

 

Larry went to Michelle’s side. George went to mine. We kissed through the screen twice and then, with whispers and movie-worthy daring, we opened the screens for another kiss. They left. Michelle and I collapsed, ecstatic.

 

My sister had heard the rustling and the whispering. She told Mother. Mother said nothing to me, deputising my sister to say plenty. But Michelle and I stayed enthralled and talked about that caper for a week.

 

Then I left for summer camp. I arrived bereft. Not entirely because I knew I would not see George for seven whole weeks. But because I suspected that Michelle would steal George from me while I was away. Why wouldn’t she?

 

So I did the best I could from 233 miles away: I wished on a star.

 

This was a life crisis I was preventing, so one wish would not be sufficient. I needed three:

 

I wish that George will miss me.

I wish that he will not like Michelle.

I wish that when I get home, he will kiss me again.

 

But the one-wish quota haunted me. Then I knew exactly what to do. I looked up at the star and said:

 

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

Wish I may,

Wish I might,

Have the three wishes I wish tonight.

 

I blew the star a thank-you kiss (hoping it would not mind that the last line no longer scanned at all).

 

It didn’t work.

 

After seven weeks camp ended, and I went home. I called Michelle. She said that she and George were now “boyfriend and girlfriend.” I cried. I told my mother. She was impressively sympathetic given that she was, I am sure, thanking God.

 

I told her that I would one day find someone as handsome as George and marry him. She said she was certain I would.

 

Already fancying myself a philosopher, I soon figured out what had really happened. George hadn’t of his own accord stopped wanting to be my boyfriend. He would really have liked to go on kissing me at parties and windows. But he had been compelled by the universal laws of morality to leave me for someone else: I had cheated.

 

I had asked the star for three wishes when you are allowed only one, no matter how linguistically clever you are about it. George had just been innocently standing there in the traffic of my greed.

 

That explanation sustained me through a whole year of grief and anemic attempts at new boyfriends (I was a challenging kid in the love department.) Eventually I discovered that George, handsome as he was, was just a guy, not a life.

 

I did, though, learn something about the discipline of one. I learned that if you edit and reduce and trim and hunt madly for the essence of something, everything turns out better. I learned that generally in life what we really want is not what we think we want at all. We want something bigger, deeper, more real, more significant, more hugely us.

 

If I had pondered that truth under the Cimarroncita first-star sky all those years ago, I am not sure what I would have wished for. But it would not have been George. It would have been joy, I think. It would have been the massive thing called a good life, called happiness, called meaning. And I would have stipulated no details. I would have asked for only one thing, probably.

 

Myself.

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