Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Snowsabers


(I'd turn down the sound before playing the video. It's significantly less magical with the roaring motors and me shouting.)

When I was a little girl, these things seriously scared me. Seriously. Mattress sales and grand openings of grocery stores were a constant threat as my hometown expanded. I still remember the pit in my stomach when Food 4 Less opened in Kenosha, WI. Thriller was on the radio, the lights were in the sky, and I was huddled in the backseat with my eyes shut tight. "Shut tight against what?" you ask? The aliens, of course. I don't know why, but of all the things to be afraid of, aliens were my thing. My fear was twofold: first, that the beams of the searchlight would actually find something in the sky, namely something saucer-shaped and flown by beings intent on brain-sucking world domination...or, at the very least, hiding in the attic that opened into my bedroom. And if intelligent beings had come millions of light years to squat in my attic, I certainly didn't want some giant, swinging beam of light to advertise my location.
We'll call it a mark of maturity, then, that rather than shutting my eyes and screaming when I caught sight of this searchlight on Saturday, I Jessica Fletchered the source of the light and drove right up to it. My courage was rewarded with a quietly stunning display of glittering snow in fast-moving beams of hypnotically swinging light.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since my hometown doesn't have anything to call attention to, I wasn't exposed to these contraptions until I got to the big city. The magic is somewhat dimmed, though, when one follows the lights to the source and ends up in front of Deja Vu.

Jaybird said...

Word.

I think it would be a fun experiment to rent one of these contraptions and stick it in my mom's Wisconsin countryside driveway and see who shows up.

Unless it's aliens.

Anonymous said...

Oh, NO you're NOT! I've had ENOUGH weird creatures show up in my driveway to last a life time.

Jaybird said...

Oh, if the aliens did show up, you'd just feel bad about how cold they must be, what with their scaly skin exposed to the harsh winter cold. "They can only come into the laundry room," you'd say, placing little dishes of food and making a nest of a bed with old towels. Slowly but surely, you'd start calling them Greeny and Five Eyes, blessed as you are with the ability to dub things by totally obvious names (Smokey the gray cat, White Cat the white cat). Then one day Five Eyes will jump on my lap as I sit down to watch TV at your house, and I'll be all, "Mom, I thought you said you weren't going to take in any more aliens." And you'll go, "Well, they just looked so sad in the laundry room."
You know it.