City Lights

Last night we went to watch Field of Dreams on the flight deck of the Intrepid. I've never been to a free movie series here, although there are quite a few. Also, I don't usually bandy around words like "magical" with phrases like "flight deck," but it was. Magical, I mean. We got there and passed through security with our lawn chairs, water, burgers and fries, and various types of m&ms, and took the see-through elevator up to the top of the Intrepid. The Intrepid is a large ship which is now part of the Sea, Air, and Space Museum (which I've never been in!! Must change that, immediately.) So we were actually docked in the Hudson River--the movie started at sunset, and we ate our food with the other 100 or so people who were there and watched New Jersey get brighter and brighter as the sky got darker and darker.

I have seen Field of Dreams approx. 967 times, but I still love it. My whole family is pretty obsessed--my cousin can quote the "baseball has marked the time" speech in its entirety. The friend I was with had seen bits of it before, but she was pretty uninitiated in the FoD magic, so that was exciting. The movie was winding down--I had cried at the part (as I ALWAYS do) when Doc Graham goes off the field to save Karin and he can't go back, and Shoeless Joe says, "hey rookie! you were good" (sob!) and the part when Ray asks his dad to have a catch (double sob!!). We were packing up, and simultaneously turned around, and there was New York City, all lit up. Since the flight deck is pretty high up, we could see everything--the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, all the other myriad skyscrapers with their glowing, glittering, prismatic lights.

Rarely am I speechless, but that did it. Especially considering that the end credits were playing (for a listen, check this out), which gave the moment a sense of grandeur. Everyone just kind of froze, and we stood there are a group for a few seconds, stunned. And then the spell lifted and we walked down many stairs, and the city looked less amazing from the ground--but for that minute, I understood why someone would spend a bazillion dollars for a penthouse apartment, to be able to see that every day.

Because I like to reference people who are more articulate than I am (not hard to be), I'm going to leave you with a passage from Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides. I read it a few weeks ago, and it is great--I had to take a Conroy break, though, because the man packs an emotional wallop. But I flagged this part at the time--and now I can safely say that I know what Tom Wingo must have felt like, looking over the city from Dr. Lowenstein's apartment:
"The huge buildings of the lower city turned sapphire and rose in the descendent retreat of sunlight, then began to answer back with their own interior light. The city was laid out before me in a forest of transfigured architecture, devotional and splendid. The sun, exhausted, caught one building whole in its last sight and imparted the hues of a coral reef in a thousand grateful windows, then slide halfway down as the whole city rose like a firebird into the singing night. The city shook off the last foils of sunset and in a thrown-back, overreaching ecstasy transformed itself into an amazing candelabrum of asymmetrical light. From where I sat, in complete darkness now, the city looked as if it were formed from glass votive candles, lightning, and glowing embers. In the beauty of those rising geometrics and fabulous metamorphosed shapes, it seemed to enlarge the sunset, improve upon it." (Conroy, 332-333)

Magical.