Great Balls of Fire!

One of my favorite spots to relax surprisingly enough, is in the crowded Starbuck's cafe within my neighborhood Barnes and Nobles. I'll take the laptop and enough money for a triple venti white chocolate mocha and a double chocolate brownie (it's like tasting cocoa again for the first time it's so ridiculously decadent). I'll open my laptop and siphon off of their wi-fi since the hotspots in my neck of the woods aren't so hot.

I typically go to watch a movie. Do a little writing. Do some downloading. Listen to music in my earbuds. But I mainly go to people watch and do a little harmless flirting.

On this particular evening, I was going through a case of the blues. The know the usual suspects: nothing going right, lonely, angry, sad, blah blah blah. One setback about this otherwise lovely little cafe is that they don't allow anyone to plug in the computers. All outlets are....well, nonexistent. I, therefore, have to spend the two hours of my battery life on something worthwhile such as a movie download I can watch later or a posting that needs some work. After two hours flies by, my computer gives me the countdown and I'm I'm outta there. The nice thing is I don't live far from the cafe. Literally a stone's throw.

This particular night of the hum drums and feeling like I needed some kind of sign that someone up there was hearing me because I was truly one step away from an old Negro Spiritual in the parking lot. I walked briskly through the bookstore parking lot, crossing the street at the first break in the typically busy traffic and began walking through the main parking lot of my building. Our lot was relatively empty of cars as usual. Nothing new. But for some reason, something made me look up and directly above the horizon of the trees and the top of the building flew something that looked like a large, failed, firework, sparking uncontrollably across the sky. For a few seconds, I stood there in awe and then it was gone. Instinctively, I turned, hoping someone...anyone was there to have witnessed what couldn't have been a 'shooting star'./ Those usually happen in a flash. If you blinked, you missed it. The best place to see a shooting star is in Oklahoma, on a clear summer night of laying on your back outside staring up at the stars or in an old Steven Spielberg film.

This was something else. I wasn't conspiracy-theory enough to think UFO, but I knew it was....something and because no one was there with me and I heard no screeching of tires in the streets from drivers who witnessed this obvious anomaly, I regained my paced and walked back to my apartment. I asked for a sign. I got a sign. Didn't know what it was a sign of, but it was definitely bigger than me and left me awestruck.

Two days ago, I spoke with one of my best friends, Shelly, who keeps one foot permanently planted in the know one evening and told her what I saw. She looked at me like I was coockoo. "Honey, it was on the news." And then she remembered I'd been weaning myself off television in an effort to.......okay, I have no cable. Ginormous television. No cable. It's the ultimate fuck-over.

Tonight, I took a look for articles about that night and came up with the following from the L.A. Times that proves I wasn't having a psychotic break, but was one of very few who witnessed a most beautiful occurrence that streaked across the dark sky like a Fourth of July sparkler, then disappeared. Wasn't nearly long enough to appreciate its brilliance, but on that specific night of prayer, it was plenty.

THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN EXCERPTED FROM THE L.A. TIMES NEWSPAPER


Folks from Oklahoma City to Houston reported having seen a fireball shoot across the sky at about 8 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Astronomers said the fiery display was likely caused by a meteor or some other space matter hurtling through the atmosphere.Texas observers blogged about the show and described it as a blue-green object trailing sparks.In central Texas, Little River-Academy Police Chief Troy Hess said he had just pulled over a driver when he managed to capture video of the fireball from his cruiser."It kept getting bigger, and the color kept changing," he told the Austin American-Statesman.

No damage was reported from the fireball.It was not clear whether any of the remnants fell to earth. Meteor sightings are common, with most burning up in the atmosphere and leaving scant debris, according to astronomers.Anita Cochran, assistant director of the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, told the American-Statesman that Wednesday's fireball was most likely small space debris. "The rare case is when it is something big," she said."It looked like a sparkler, almost," Lisa Coleman, who lives outside College Station, Texas, told local TV station KBTX."There was just this huge meteor-like rock falling across the sky and I thought, 'Wow, that's really huge to be a shooting star,' but it lasted about 12 to 15 seconds and it had a sparkling, flaring tail," Coleman said.Texas A&M astronomy professor Nicholas Suntzeff told KBTX the meteor was not as huge as it appeared -- probably only about the size of a fist. He attempted to dispel some other meteor myths."If they do hit the earth, they are not hot, they are cold. ... There is the fire around them, but ... the meteor itself remains cold," Suntzeff said. "It almost never produces a fire when it hits the earth."Suntzeff said the type of meteor that residents spotted, likely a bolide meteor, is both bright and rare -- most people will probably never see one again in their lifetime."Usually it's just a fraction of a second; here it was like five seconds or so. Again, I've only seen a few of those in my life. I wish I'd seen it," he said.Another odd fact about this week's fireball: The sighting occurred on the ninth anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia falling to earth over east Texas.[For the Record, 1:05 p.m., Feb.3: An earlier version of this post -- and its headline -- referred to the meteor as a meteorite. A meteorite is a portion of a meteor that reaches the Earth intact.]