Chasing Lights Prologue

“…each fragment contains a lifetime that can grow and live complete inside whomever pays attention, everything in flickering darkness and light.”

Chasing lights

On a heavy Chicago afternoon in June with the world still locked away from COVID-19, I stood alone outside the garage watching my wife, college-aged daughter, and two cats drive away. I had just bought the car, a black Mercedes sedan, when the lease expired. After years of struggle, there was enough money in the bank to buy it for her. And then she was gone.

“I’m doing this for me,” she said.

I didn’t know it then, but a thirty-year marriage ended while I stood there in the alley. Dark thunderheads alternated with hot sun while a breeze fluttered the Linden tree. Thick silence. She told me I had wasted her youth. Despite my efforts to be what she wanted, to do what was expected; she suffered with me in her life. My footsteps harmed others. I failed.

I needed the light back. It was there before. It raced across the sky once upon a time. It was there before I grew up, before I failed to be important enough. Memory, like light, can fade. I worried that too much was lost, but the pieces I found had volumes of information enfolded in the detail.

In the 1942 film Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman fell in love as they drove through the French countryside, floated on the Seine, and drank champagne in a hotel as an army invaded Paris. An escape was planned but then Mr. Bogart stood alone on a train platform with a mysterious goodbye letter falling apart in the rain. Love blossomed, grew, and ended while a city fell to war. Four minutes of screen time, four minutes of fragments, a complete story remembered forever.

The first time I saw the movie, I was twelve or thirteen years old. I’ve watched it many times since. So much happened in just four minutes. A brief montage of darkness and light, capturing a life story.

I used to believe that montages were a cheat, that film makers figured out a way to tell a back story with a minimum of expense or time. “Cut to the chase.”

That may be true, but what if a montage is the most accurate, efficient, and powerful form of storytelling? Our memories, after all, consist of just a few gestures, words, sounds, or smells. We fill in the gaps of our own memories. We do the same thing with a movie montage—fill in the gaps.

Fragments contain everything we need to feel, everything we need to know. And each fragment contains a lifetime that can grow and live complete inside whomever pays attention, everything in flickering darkness and light.

Let’s begin with the light.

The Northern Lights shine often in Alaska. More than a hundred nights a year, they pulse and wave across the sky—except when clouds or midnight sunshine get in the way. The lights are electrons thrown off by the sun that light up the atmosphere on contact; harmless and ordinary. But still, when ghost-like curtains of light sweep across the dome of the sky without a sound, it’s hard not to look.

The lights happen without us. They overwhelm the sky before anyone even notices. We can’t control them. We will never catch them.

The lights are a sort of magic. When I was a kid, I wondered if they were spirits from another world trying to tell us something…or maybe provoke questions like how big is big and how much does it matter?

They infected my childhood in Alaska. Now, as an adult, when someone asks, “Where are you from?” I share the magic with a story.

“I grew up in Alaska.”

Eyes open wide, faces brighten, and people lean in as images of tundra, mountains, and wild bears dance in their heads and they remember reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild, or seeing that old cable television show, The Deadliest Catch.

“You are the first person I’ve ever met from Alaska. What was it like?” “Is it dark all winter?” “How could you stand the cold?” “Have you ever seen a polar bear?” “What do the Northern Lights look like?”

Telling stories of life under the lights is a reliable party trick. But as I drifted past middle age, I lost interest in sharing them. The world became dimmer. Winters felt duller than I remembered. Where did the stories go?

As I stood alone in a Chicago alley watching my wife and daughter leave forever, as my world fell away, I needed to find the stories again.

Let’s give it another try. Bring back the light.

Imagine the sky from horizon to horizon. The Northern Lights make it impossible to ignore the ridiculously large size of the sky. That realization is the point of it. Under lights the expanse overwhelms. Photographs can’t catch it. The lights make it clear how small you are, how your problems, your victories, and your fears mean almost nothing. Life is both light and dark and at the end of the day, random. There’s no light switch or button to push. It happens.

It was time to chase the lights again. Accept smallness as fact and let go of self-importance. Burn with memory.

Tell a better story.