Article Contributed on: 11/22/2008 2:25:44 PM
There's something about the color of the sky around dusk this time of year. It's a set of hues - purples, reds, and oranges - rolling across the clouds as the sun dissolves into the peaks to the west. This display calls me outside, to stand in the rapidly chilling air, and to recall the countless individual times in my life in which I've found myself outside, gazing up at nearly identical skies, and simply letting my mind wander.
Life changes on a truly universal scale, and these moments can tend to flash through one's memory and into the ether if there isn't a bit of time taken to relish them. My first recollection of the November evening sky dates back to around 1984, standing in my neighbor's front yard with my friends Brandon and Billy, and carving up the crunchy, refrozen snow around us in a bid to "out-Voltron" each other. I stood for a moment, watching the setting sun, listening to the sound of my heart beating in my ears, and watching as my breath drifted into the sky like a ghost. Something about that moment has stuck with me for more than 20 years now, and it tends to be the first thing that pops into my mind upon viewing a sky like the one under which I stood that evening.
The next such moment took place probably two years later, as I walked through the parking lot at my grandmother's apartment complex, heading to the mailboxes to collect her mail for the day. It was a Saturday night, and we spent every Saturday evening together for a number of years. It was a ritual for us, and as such, contained a few required elements - dinner from McDonald's or (if we were feeling particularly wild & crazy) Arby's,
Small Wonder on Channel 9, and finally, a switch over to Channel 4 (when it was still an NBC affiliate) for the Saturday night lineup of
The Facts of Life,
227,
Amen,
The Golden Girls, and
Empty Nest. Each Saturday, I walked to the mailboxes, and on one particular evening, I took not of the color of the sky, and the chill in the air as I stood beside the now-covered and empty complex pool. This memory, like so many others from those Saturday nights, stays with me today.
Just this past week, I stood in the chill air on my back patio, and once again glanced upward to catch the waning light, and the spectrum of colors splashed across the clouds. I'm now a husband, and a father two times over. I just finished a graduate school degree, and have all of the stresses that accompany adult life - a mortgage, a job, worries about raising my kids, etc. Still, standing outside in the coll air of November, tiny under a spreading, darkening sky, I find myself transported to the many simpler times that have come before, and yet grateful for the life I lead in the here and now.
So much changes, and yet, the thread of familiarity runs throughout the course of life, tying one segment to another, and ensuring that no matter how far we've come, we remain only ourselves - living life as it comes. At the end of the day, that's not so bad a thing.