The view

I drive to work in the dark. The sun isn't quite ready to peak out at 5:30 in the morning. At least not in winter. My path takes me east down Layton Avenue. This busy street is lined with street lights until you get to the landing path of the airplanes. All of a sudden everything turns to black. No street lights. If you look either left or right you can see the red and blue runway lights on either side of the road lined up like little soldiers all in a row. This morning, in this pure stretch of darkness, a plane was landing and flew right over my car. The lights on its underbelly were so bright that it felt like I was under a spotlight. It made me think of Close Encounters of a Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss was approached by the aliens at the railroad crossing. The road shook as the plane went by me and amazingly all this happened in the blink of an eye. All I could think was WOW. And before I knew it, I was back under the streetlights turning left onto 794. I never really noticed the streetlights on that strip of road before.