I love the night…I love the deep dark quiet and the big velvet blue. I don’t want to sound corny about this but I really love the night…and so what – what does it mean to me, the big cheesy yellow moon? The stars that my sister thought were holes in the sky. She always thought backwards which is one of my biggest blessings in the whole world, to have a sister who I love who looks at everything from the back. I can always know that my sister will see things exactly as I do not.
My sister also has an incredible sense of color…color relationships. It’s just in her. She is able to see the color combinations that are impossible to me. She will see the most subtle of all colors in a complicated piece of fabric and she will pull that exact color out of the fabric and paint her kitchen cabinets with it…and me…I never even saw it till she already bought the paint!
Other night things…I don’t like to be scared…but the night all by itself does not and never will scare me. It’s only all the lurking shadow lovers that scare me. Beings that take the good soft bounciness of the night…which is like a gigantic comforter that your real strong friends will hold the corners of and toss you into to the air till you laugh yourself silly…and the lurkers will use it to hide their evil intentions and maybe even scare you…I don’t like it.
I’m OK with owls…I mean to an owl it’s really day anyway…and those other big eyed expandable eye pupil animals…they are fine…and they make great sounds. Well all right…if you insist on knowing, I would rather have extra terrestrials visit in the day. Like at Teatime. That’s when I would rather be confronted with life from another planet. Of course that spoils the lighting effects, especially if the beings actually glow themselves. But hey…let me get use to you before I have to deal with the special effects, OK? Don’t scare me, all right? Then I’ll have fun showing you around.
I love my fireplace in the night…snowy winter nights by the fire…another time that I choose not to be disturbed by visitors from outer space. I mean if I have a preference, that is. As a matter of fact I would like to be shopping downtown when the aliens land…and I wouldn’t go pushing my shopping cart in an insane direction when the spacecraft landed. I would probably just stand in awe. I guess I would try to calculate if poison gas was coming my way…and I would be able to see it too because it wouldn’t be night.
Well, on second thought I would like to see the space ship land at Wegman’s at about 2 A.M. but this is only for the light effects and other witnesses. Otherwise it has to be Tea Time.
I’m pretty sure my sister believes in beings from other planets living amongst us. What am I talking about? She still tells about the seven-foot tall sheik in the long black coat that bumped into her on East 86th Street and when she turned to look at him she saw instead a little old lady with a white flowery hat…and that was the daytime!
I did have a nighttime disappointment once. Something I never saw coming. I was with my boyfriend Leon. We were in his 1950 Ford convertible with the top up. He just finally got his license and it was our first ride around date and it was raining. I thought, the rain on the fabric roof and driving around at night on the dark streets in October was going to be the best possible combination of my favorite things, cars, night and rain…when all of a sudden, on coming car lights and every light in the whole night…on that street…were all glaring off the wet pavement and sparkling in annoying pin pricks of pointed light from every rain drop on the windshield. It had the emotional effect of a migraine it was so radically disappointing.
It is rare for me to miss the wacky geometry of reflection, but I was young then. It still happens however, there are still things like pin prick reflections that work their way into my quote unquote perfect universe…things that have a way of activating when I least expect it…that can come whimpering or roaring to life right before my eyes…and I’m shocked that I didn’t see them coming…maybe they’ve lurked in under a shadow…I don’t really know…but I do know that I will never blame it on the night.
