sparks

mary donovan and i careened into a laughing fit at the circus in moscow in 1985. way down on the stage, performers were smashing swords together, and every time metal hit metal, cool sparks would fly from the swords. when we saw this, we screamed “sparks” – at the very same time the music and the audience fell silent.

i don’t like to fly much. that is, i don’t like to feel like i will crash during takeoff (or any other time!). this is no secret. but the flight home from cleveland last night went as well as any other, and the turbulence was only as bad as a bad muni ride. the cool part, however, was watching the cloud-to-cloud lightning at 39,000 feet, something like the sparks flying all around at the circus. we were flying towards the glow of the long sunset, navigating through the tops of dark thunderheads, and the sky just kept blinking and sparking, blinking and sparking…

i saw my first fireflies over the weekend. i felt like a city fool. there we were, just after sunset on the back lawn of a big house in the middle of ohio, and suddenly i saw a spark rise up from the lawn. then, there were more. mostly under the trees. everyone around was talking about how there weren’t as many as there have been in previous years. i thought it was just so cool; they kept rising up, like ashes sparking up from flames. sparking and rising, sparking and rising …

appropriate, since leanne and i prepared for the trip last wednesday night (so long ago…) by dining at one of our favorites, firefly.

people fly. they seem to do it all the time. you can actually see some pretty cool things. and cleveland, well it was pretty neat, and the rivers don’t catch on fire any more.