Once when I was in grad school, I was walking in a park near my apartment on a sunny afternoon in early fall when suddenly the sky turned dark purple. The leaves on the trees shook. The air, which had been clear, was now heavy. A bolt of lighting flashed down and struck a tree several yards away; a thunderclap followed only seconds later. I knew I should move to a more grounded area, but I was transfixed. I had to see what happened next.
As I watched, the sky brightened again, the air cleared, and the trees calmed down. The entire episode didn't take more than 15 minutes, and none of the neighbors I asked had even noticed anything amiss.
The next day I described the episode to a classmate who was also an aspiring writer. "You really are a writer," he comment. When I asked him to explain, he said, "Any sane person would have run for shelter. You had to go for the narrative--to see the story to its end."
I thought about that last Thursday, also a beautiful afternoon in early fall, when a friend and I were on the Circle Line boat tour around Manhattan, and the sky suddenly went black. The boat started pitching, and lightning shot down the sides of the tall buildings, accompanied by deafening thunder. Something hard hit me in the back of the head, and I saw a glittering object on the deck nearby. When I picked it up, it turned out to be a perfectly round ball of ice, which I thought at first must have been dropped or thrown from the drink of someone on the upper deck. But then more of them came shooting down from the sky, and we realized they were a form of hail.
"Bloody hell," said the woman next to me as she and her party, like most of the people on our deck, started to scurry inside. "Aren't you coming in?"
But my friend and I, and a few other lunatics, were glued to the deck. "When will you ever have another experience like this?" I asked the woman.
"Never, I hope!" she retorted and disappeared.
We were rewarded by the sight of the black clouds dispersing over the area surrounding the Statue of Liberty, so that she seemed surrounded by a fuchsia aura, staving off the storm with her glowing torch. I had my phone with me, but didn't even think to take a picture.
But I must, indeed, be a writer, because I did have the thought that I couldn't wait to tell you all about it.
Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D.,is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself,she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity(Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog, and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.
I think that I would have done the same and just stay there watching with my own eyes. Life is to short to not live it.
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Posted by: PRAS_Advertise | September 24, 2010 at 12:04 PM