Life is What Happens While You Are Making Other Plans

We have very lovely skies up here in New Hampshire in the winter.  They are pink at sunrise and sunset, but "pink" hardly does the color justice. Magenta, vermilion, scarlet, crimson,  none of the names for colors quite fit. You just sort of look at the sky and stop breathing for a moment and wonder whether or not you will ever see that color again, in your whole life. And then, some days later, if  you are looking in the right direction, at the right time of day, there it is again, and you feel as you did the first time you ever saw it.

Walking home at dusk one night at college, with my  girlfriend, who was from Texas, we were brought to a halt by the color of the sky, and then the lights began to move and sparkle and we stood there looking West from College Hill over Providence, Rhode Island, and we thought, well this might be an extra terrestrial invasion, but if we die right here, right now, at least we've seen this.

It turned out to be the Northern Lights. We were both from the South, so neither of us had any idea what we were looking at. We weren't alone in our ignorance. The Northern Lights are not often seen as far south as Providence, so there were frantic phone calls to radio stations--there was no Twitter then, no Facebook, actually, no computers. So information got around more slowly. People noticed the sky that evening, and it made them stop what they were doing.

Years later, I looked out over the East River at Queens, from the 15th floor of The New York Hospital (now the New York-Presbyterian Hospital) and a night nurse walked by and saw me staring at the blood red sky.  "You okay?" she asked.

"Look at that," I said, "Have you ever?"
"Every morning," she said. "In the winter."

I had been called to see a patient before sunrise and had finished with that patient, and walked out of the room and the color from the window at the end of the hallway transfixed me.  When I was lucky, I got to sleep through sunrise on that ward, but this time I was called and I was even luckier, because I got to see Queens drenched in that most spectacular rose color.

The nurse, who was probably twenty-three,  had worked nights for some time,  and she was always up at sunrise and it was just what she saw every morning.  I was three years older and had never seen anything quite like it. The sky that color, yes in college, but this time it was bathing an entire borough, and from that height I could see out 15, 20 miles, out to Long Island.  And that sleeping city, stirring maybe, but covered and united in a single stroke of color.

Then my beeper went off and I had to go find a phone, and return to planet Earth. Or rather, leave planet Earth and return to the small ant hill where I lived and functioned and kept my head down and signed orders and made phone calls and examined patients, and slipped plastic catheters into veins and hung intravenous solutions and blood and washed my hands and gave reports and made rounds and did what I was supposed to do. 

But over my shoulder was Queens, the cosmos and life on the third rock from the sun.