Some of my favorite memories from my childhood involve laying flat on my back on sticky, green grass, staring up at the clouds with my neighbors, and inventing stories about how they got up there. Because we'd paid a bit of attention in school, we knew the basics about clouds - which ones brought rain, which ones were just pretty to look at, etc. - but that didn't stop us from imagining. My theory, which was widely discredited on our block, was that the giant marshmallow man from Ghostbusters was somehow responsible for the perfect placement of the puffy, cotton-ball clouds. I thought, perhaps, those clouds in the sky were his blubber for the winter months. When the weather began to change come October and November, he'd just reach up with his huge hands and grab a handful of clouds and pad himself. Another theory - in my neighborhood, we'd all heard that old saying about when lightning strikes, it means an angel bowled a strike up in heaven. A friend of mine chose to believe the white puffs were from the angels smoking in the bowling alley in the heavens above. Silly, yes, but one of the most respected opinions on the block.
I think, in the process of growing up, we forget to look up at the clouds and use our imagination. They still take various and sundry forms up there, some looking like the rabbit we had when I was in elementary school, others resemble the creepy school bus driver from kindergarten. What's so exciting about clouds is that I can look up and get lost in them, searching for something familiar, and then the wind blows, carrying them five, ten, fifty miles away and someone else can look up and get lost in the same clouds, albeit they've no doubt taken a very different shape by then. For that reason alone, I completely resent the statement, "get your head out of the clouds."
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