I was in the kitchen last night, minding my own business, probably cooking or at least preparing to cook. Kevin was in the bathroom, just finishing a shower. Maguire was in the living room in his usual position, splayed on the floor, snoring and drooling.

I raised my glass of wine for a sip, since in my kitchen and in my house, evening food doesn’t happen without wine; it’s not civilized. Suddenly, something somewhere in the house crashed and crashed hard. I turned, curious. And called out to my husband: Honey?
No response. I put my glass down and walked to the doorway, expecting to see him sitting at the foot of the stairs tying his shoes. He wasn’t there. Maguire, however, was where he was supposed to be.

Kev? A little concerned now. He came strolling out of the bedroom; he had heard the crash, too, though didn’t seem terribly concerned. We could find nothing downstairs where the majority of the house spreads, so Kevin trucked upstairs since whatever had fallen from the sky seemed to resonate from on high. Nothing in the loft office, he reported. I sipped my wine, doing my due diligence. Silence from above. Anything, I asked?
“Looks like the showerhead broke off.” The bathroom upstairs, off of Justin’s old room now known as the guest room and the guest bath, has been under gradual renovation. We’re redoing the floor, we redid the vanity; replaced the showerhead.
Oops.
This is not the first time we’ve had things fall unexpectedly from the sky inside the house. There was that one day many years ago when I was on the phone, luckily with Bobbi, and there was a huge crash in the house, I hung up quickly and dashed out of my office to find that the 1948 Roadmaster bicycle that we have suspended up above the foyer, on the bridge that holds the duct work from the A/C and more, had broken free of its moorings to land with a loud bang on the marble floor below. I was just happy that Maguire, who often lays directly under that bridge in the foyer because that’s where his kennel once resided, was out in the backyard, sleeping.
Then there was the time that Kevin was on the ladder in the great room on a Thanksgiving morning, the top of the extension resting against the high beam, when the ladder slipped and my husband crashed down, hitting the wine table, destroying his ankle ligaments and rendering him nearly crippled for life.
Shortly there after, in January, as we were watching the series finale of Sex and the City, sitting opposite one another, Kevin on the couch, me on the love seat, the coffee table between us, there was a loud crack. Both of us looked toward the fireplace, and the huge mirror that was on the wall reaching from the mantle to the ceiling. We both watched in horror as it peeled away from the top of the wall, at the ceiling, as if in slow motion, finally pulling away in total to crash between us onto the coffee table, splintering into a million pieces of glass that flew across the room, destroying the couches, demolishing a potter’s bowl purchased in an art gallery and a clock shaped like an electronic ice-cream cone. Once again and luckily, Maguire was outside.
When anything crashes these days, my first thought is: Where’s the dog? He doesn’t hear anything anymore so he wouldn’t hear anything falling from the sky; he’d just feel it if it landed on him. It’s one of my biggest fears, and I celebrate the fact that he has not been harmed by any of these things falling from the sky.
Last night, the only thing that fell from our internal sky was an inconsequential showerhead, easily replaced with a trip to Home Depot.

And undoubtedly a star or a thousand, somewhere, someplace in the world and the universe.