Towards the conclusion of World War II, my father was stationed out in the Pacific on Guam. It was a far cry, indeed, from his Brooklyn home.

Decades later, after man had already been to the moon, he told me that it always struck him as interesting that when he looked up into the night sky over those distant jungles, he saw the same familiar features of the moon he observed on the roof of his apartment building on Summer evenings in the l930s. An antidote for homesickness, I suppose.

Growing up in Levittown in the late l960s and early 70s, I always had the opposite impression. I always felt that the property line above our backyard extended upward without end; that the sky was where Levittown touched infinity itself. Consequently, over the years, I have always had the sense of what author/entomologist Howard Ensign Evans described as observing "the universe from a suburban porch."

Curious natural phenomena have not been wanting above our little patch of Earth.

Years ago, Bill, a longtime Levittown resident who now lives in North Carolina, told me that in the early l950's, there was on our block, a family hailing from a religious sect preoccupied with the end of the world. Now auroral light appears on only about 4 percent of all evenings in the New York area and is seldom bright enough to be especially conspicuous. But every few decades, the night sky glows with weird colored illuminations as it did on that night back in l952 or l953. What was an uncommon delight to most people was, to this family, an omen of doom and consequently, they held a prayer vigil on the front lawn. Like those people who were utterly convinced that Apollo XI had something to do with the rainy weather of late July and early August of l969, nothing but the passage of time could persuade them to the contrary.

Twenty years or so after the aurora borealis, on a stormy summer day, the flagpole on Bill's lawn was struck by a blinding white flash of lightning. The horrific thunderclap was the loudest one I have ever heard before or since (after all, I was less than 100 feet away). A few minutes later, another neighbor, Jean, reported seeing "ball lightning" in her living room. The ghostly, glowing, orb of ionized gas drifted across the room skittishly, like its elusive kin, St. Elmo's Fire, before vanishing with a hiss and a pop.

In their wonderful book, Harking Back, Bethpage historians Alonzo and Iris Gibbs reported that during the l920s and 30s, their Plainview farm was menaced by thunderstorms of great violence and electrical intensity that swept across the Hempstead Plains. Oddly, they noted, the fury of the elements seemed to die down "after the building of Levittown."

One summer night about five years ago, my wife, Cathy, and I observed a strange luminous cloud that flickered and flashed within. It drifted over northern Levittown and southern Hicksville and all around it was a perfectly clear evening sky with stars twinkling.

Levittowners over the years have been treated to memorable, if less

localized phenomena. Comet Kohoutek turned out to be a flop. But since it was supposed to be visible, even in the daytime, in January of l974,

a lot of Levittown kids got telescopes for Christmas and Chanukah. We had to settle for photographs in the newspaper from Skylab. Hopefully in 2062, Haley's Comet will show more than the faint smudge I saw peering through the telescope in February of l986. Thank goodness for Hale-Bopp in March and April of l997.

There have been eclipses of the sun and moon over the years. The most recent one being this past Christmas. The first one I recall was on July 30, l973.

Some people anchor themselves firmly in this razor-thin sliver of eternity we call human history by recalling, in exacting detail, where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that Pearl Harbor was bombed, JFK was assassinated, and Apollo XI landed on the moon. But I have seen enough of the stars and planets make their transit over my backyard, and thunderstorms rage overhead, to know that Levittown is as good a place to call the center of the universe as anywhere else.