like the violin

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor and three people walked in. They were carrying two mysterious big black things, and they must have seen me wondering what it was, because after the "hellos" one of them said "it's okay, ask away!" with a smile.

It was a home-made telescope.
- We are going up on to the water tower to look at Mars, they explained, it's clearly visible right now.
It's a rather cold Saturday night, the air is crisp. As we walked out on the road outside our building, one of them said:
- You are a lindy hopper, aren't you?
A bit surprised, I nodded and asked how he knew that. It turned out that he had been to one of the crash courses Kristian and I have been teaching at Duke's Place. "And it's not weird you don't recognize me since there were two hundred of us and only two of you", he said, so as to help me out of the embarrassment of not having a clue who he was.

However, the conversation had started, and it kept on going. I found out that two of them live in a collective in the corner apartment of the fourth floor (Sam, who I think knows everyone in the whole building, has told me about it), that one of them (a young man named Anders) had built the telescope himself with the help of a friend of Lisa's who I like a lot (it's a small world) and that they were very nice.

- I should turn lefthere, I said as we reached the turnaround at the end of our very short street.
- Unless you want to look at Mars and some stars with us? they said.

This star thing has been a fascination of mine for a long while (and would be even more so if I weren't the kind of person who wants to know and understand almost everything - I don't have time to learn as much as I would like to about every subject there is). I try to make it to the observatory in Slottsskogen once every winter, to just look at stars and have things explained and ask lots of questions and learn the names of stars and constellations and what comets really are made of and why stars seem to be blinking, all these things inspire me and make me curious.

I love being out in the woods, where there are no houses or streets and the sky looks as though sprinkled with a fine dust - have you seen it? When you suddenly realise that there are stars everywhere, everywhere in between the brighter shining dots that would usually be all you'd see up there; how the night sky that's just a matte reddish grey with a few white star dots when in the city, suddenly turns all silvery with the light from thousands of thousands of stars ...

But there was much to see even now, in the middle of all of Göteborg's light pollution. Stars ... I know why it's difficult to see the Pleiades if you look right at them, and how to find Polaris; I know what Cassiopeia, Orion and the Swan look like and that Castor and Pollux (named so after a pair of twins in a Greek myth) are the two brightest stars in the Gemini constellation; I know that Vega is a bright shining star in Lyra and that Bellatrix and Betelgeuse are in Orion. But there is so much more out there! Anders seemed an inexhaustible store of knowledge concerning these matters. I could have stayed a lot longer, weren't it for the fact that I was on my way to the balboa night, and therefore wore a pair of rather thin dance pants.

- How nice to have finally met you, I said, I have been wanting to invite myself for fika at your place for a while now.
- Oh, do that, soon!, they said, laughing a little. I sometimes forget that not everyone is used to my way of inviting myself in for fika - nor to my direct way of talking.

What do I want to say with this? Maybe that I still believe in the beauty and magic of unexpected meetings? That there is more good than evil in the world? That there are friends everywhere if only you try a little (and I really didn't need to try that hard)? Or maybe just that I like stars.