Rodney Curtis

If you’re a hard core person of science, I apologize for what you’re about to read. If cause and effect, stimulus – response are your deities, then I don’t have a prayer of convincing you otherwise. Regardless, you are invited to stick around. I’d like it if you would.

As a child growing up in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan, the neighborhood kids all seemed to have a deal with their parents; you could stay out and play until the streetlights came on. Back in the day, we didn’t have organized play dates. Things were far looser. You could walk out the door and apart from checking in for lunch and dinner, moms and dads didn’t monitor every move you made. It’s not that they didn’t care about us, it’s just that neighborhoods felt safer.

Streetlights signaled the end of the daily adventures. They’d come on a lot earlier in winter, much later in summer. My first story in my first book talked about a different, wholly strange dynamic surrounding streetlights. I wrote that they represented my deceased father talking to me. Well, communicating I guess, not really talking per say.

It’s been happening pretty much since my Dad died. I’ve noticed streetlights going crazy, blinking on or off whenever I’m near by. Sometimes a whole row of them blink out, well past dusk or dawn when they’d normally be called upon to perform. Most times though, it’s just a solitary one snapping off or popping on as I drive by.

Yes, you science folks from the first paragraph should be quick to point out that streetlights can turn off and on at the end of their life cycles. You would do well to direct me to the articles online, including on Wikipedia that say I am engaged in magical thinking. Believing streetlights are reacting to you even has a name, The SLI Effect. Go ahead, assure me that it’s simply coincidence or wishful thinking; I’m okay with that.

But I’m also okay seeing it as a way to connect with my dead Dad. My daughters, when we pass by one that blinks, say “Hi Grandpa Chuck.” My wife and I say, “Thanks for letting us know you’re here Dad.”

There’s no way I can convince someone otherwise, just as you won’t be able to convince me it’s not my father. So what does it matter? This video I shot, while snapping pictures of the moon during its close orbit of earth, shows the phenomenon happening to me. Watch for the light to come on just “above” the moon. I don’t offer it up as proof of the paranormal, just proof that what I’m saying actually happens.

And maybe you’ll like this final part; or maybe you’ll shake your head in sadness at my delusions. But as I am writing this, my cellphone next to me suddenly turns on and flashes the screen saver picture of my wife. A few minutes later I text her asking if she was trying to get in touch with me.

She phones me right away and said she thought about calling me a few minutes previously but didn’t dial or even pick up her phone when she realized it was late and I’d probably be in bed.

So there’s another instance of strange lights blinking weirdly around me. The more it happens, the more I smile. I’m not hurting anyone by my worldview and it helps me see a larger interconnection with everything and everybody. I concluded the story in my book by wondering why I was telling the story in the first place. I think it’s to share the mystery.

I love that we don’t know everything. I relish the bits of our lives that are completely fantastical. Knowing that quantum scientists hypothesize 11 different dimensions of reality or that astrophysicists say 90-some percent of the universe is unexplained dark energy or dark matter really gets me going. It’s just plain mystical, enigmatic, exciting and altogether fun.