Thursday, December 14, 2006

Look! Up in the sky!

A weather service warning scrolling across the bottom of my TV screen alerted me that the Northern Lights had been spotted over West Michigan. The best place to view them from, I was informed, was from somewhere dark. Undaunted by the fact that I lived in an apartment complex, I raced downstairs to the parking lot. This was not an entirely bad notion, in that a) at least I was outside and b) the parking lot light is often burned out, in which case the parking lot feels very, very dark.

I exited through the front door and was looking up at the sky before I reached the sidewalk to the parking lot. There were no Northern Lights visible, and, perhaps in related news, the light in the parking lot was quite bright.

So I didn't get to fulfill my dream of seeing the Northern Lights. But I did see, out of the corner of my eye as I was gazing up earnestly, that the man out walking his two dogs across the way had started looking up, too.

That, along with the three constellations I recognized instantly, made my evening.

2 comments:

Hell Hamster said...

Hey Suzanne. It's Micah.

This one time, when I was little, we were in North Dakota. And it was like 3 in the morning or something obscene, and my parents came and woke me up. And they were all "Dude check out the northern lights, there's no cities for 150 miles in any direction, you're never going to see them this beautiful from anywhere else in the United States"

but it was 3 am and I was so pissed that they woke me up early, that I think I refused to look at the sky. That sounds like me at least. I don't think my parents actually called me 'dude' though. So it sounds like I took some pretty big liberties with parts of this story.

Take it or leave it, I guess

Thursday said...

Or maybe the person did call you dude, and it wasn't either of your parents, but just some random person who wandered into your room, and really there were no Northern Lights, either, he was just trying to kidnap you.

Not getting out of bed at 3 a.m. may have saved your life.