Sights Not Meant to Be Seen

(Photo taken by swift447)

It was the strangest thing.

The mornings are getting later, and so this morning as I was driving to work, I saw the sun coming up. I could just see it peeking over the clouds, and it was the most startling blood-red sun I had ever seen. It was astonishing, almost unearthly.

See that picture above? (That's not today's sunrise, for the record, and it's not even Seattle.) It was weirder than that. The color was darker, more viscous. You could practically see it dripping.

I tried to find a spot to pull over. The sun rose in seconds, the blood-red crown rising into a full scarlet sun burning the sky, menacing all of us down below. And suddenly, before I could snap a picture with my cell phone, the otherworldly color was gone. It had transformed.

And then the sun was its normal color - that lovely friendly goldenrod yellow that we all think of as the sun's true color. But for a moment, it was the color of nightmare, warning, fear. I felt the way you'd feel if you caught a glimpse of a werewolf changing back into its human form. I had seen something I wasn't meant to see - the sun in its true diabolical form. The sun as a wild snarling beast of nature, warming us not for our pleasure but for its own amusement.

Three Questions

For the last couple of months, Oliver has insisted on us telling him a story every night. It's exhausting. Usually, we're exhausted by the time we get to putting him to bed, and the sheer brainpower to come up with a new story is painful. Usually, I resort to telling him fables or new versions of old stories: "Once upon a time, there were three bears, and they lived in a third-floor walkup apartment..."

So I tried something new last night. A friend gave me the idea: he can ask me three questions, about anything he wants. And then I struggle to answer. Easy, I thought.

So these were his three questions last night:

1) Why does the world spin around and around?

2) Why does Chloe have a tail?

3) Why do they put that floaty stuff (helium) in balloons?

Easy. No problem. I just had to explain planetary rotation, the basic principles of evolution, and the elemental properties of helium. That's it.

I just looked on Google to try and find a simple answer for 1), and this is the best I found. It's mind-boggling.

I think he's going to be a scientist, and a brilliant one at that.