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17-December-1998 
98394 
 
    Another Time, Another Star 
 
    by Vic Jameson 
    Reprinted from "Presbyterian Voice" with permission 
    by the Synod of Living Waters 
 
    It was a windy, dusty night.  Not that such was unusual; wind and dust 
are the defining features of the village, and of the wide, flat land that 
surrounds it.  But just at dusk on this night the wind had shifted from 
west to northeast and a choking cloud of dust bowl dust had obliterated the 
differences between ground and sky.  Automobile lights on the highway that 
formed the town's main street grew dim from half a block away; the signs 
that advertised the one gasoline station and the one bar flickered 
uselessly in the dirty brown dark. 
 
    The boy should not have been out.  His parents would have forbidden it. 
But he had been at a party at the Methodist church, an after-school party 
to celebrate the onset of the Christmas holidays, and the storm had caught 
him and others there.  The pastor would have urged him to stay until rides 
could be arranged or the storm lessened but the boy, headstrong as he was 
thoughtless had simply left. 
 
    He knew the direction home and there was no reason he should get lost. 
It was, after all, only a small town and he had lived there for half of his 
ten years.  But if you have ever been caught in a dust bowl era storm, you 
know what can happen in it.  Dust stings the eyes, clogs the nose, fills 
the mouth, lessens the vision.  In short, confuses the senses. 
 
    The boy knew the way, but after a while the way wasn't where he 
thought.  The street should have led him from the church to the school, and 
a cow path from the school to his home. Instead he stumbled into a ditch 
and got turned around in emerging.  He walked into a cholla cactus half as 
tall as himself and its spines pricked his hands, his upper legs, his right 
knee. 
 
    By what we would mostly call luck, he was at that time less than a 
block from his home but he did not know it.  He could not see it.  He had 
counted on the lights in the windows of his family's modest house to guide 
him, but the shades had been drawn against the relentless infiltration of 
blowing dirt.  He was alone, in the dust, in the dark and he did not know 
what to do. 
 
    Then he saw the star. 
 
    It was not a Bethlehem star, nothing of magic and miracles.  It was a 
dime store electric star that had been part of his mother's Christmas 
decorations for as many years as he could remember.  He had never thought 
anything much about it.  At Christmas there was a tree, decorated with 
mostly homemade trinkets, strings of red or silver tinsel over doorways, a 
gradual accumulation of presents around the tree, and the little electric 
star. 
 
    He saw it through the rising and falling of the dust, the rise and fall 
making it seem to twinkle in the dark.  Saw it, squinting against the 
ragged edges of dust particles blowing into his eyes.  Saw it and found his 
way to the front door and to home. 
 
    There is no reason to think anything dire would have happened to the 
boy.  The temperature was not so low that he would have frozen, although he 
would have been discomforted.  His parents would have worried and, panicky, 
would have searched for him and maybe by some stroke of luck found him, in 
the dust-laden dark.  In any case he would most surely have found his 
bearings, or be found, when daylight returned and the storm died away. 
 
    So it did not have the markings of a tragic thing. 
 
    It was, though, a thing the family talked about, in that Christmas 
season and later ones, when they or the preacher or a Christmas pageant 
retold the story of other travelers, long before, who had found their own 
way, through another kind of darkness, to another kind of home, with the 
help of another kind of star. 

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