Clouds and Disappointments

Clouds and Disappointments         

 

By John W. Vander Velden

 

For part of my childhood we lived in central Florida.  My parent both came from large families, and family meant a great deal to them.  So each year we loaded up the 59 Chevrolet Biscayne and drove the 1100 miles to Northern Indiana.  The two long days within the white Chevrolet offered a view of the country I could never have imagined.  But I remember a particular morning on our first return when the winding mountain road led up and up.  I remember seeing the clouds, in the distance, low enough that the mountain’s higher points lay blanketed.  I stared breathlessly out of the windshield from my perch in the back seat as we climbed higher and higher moving closer and closer to clouds.  Until that morning I had only seen clouds very far above my head.  For I like any child had looked up, scanned the sky, watching the “great white sailing ships” move across the blue.  Or observed the gigantic dark tumbling masses build on gray wet days.  Clouds were big…real…but most of all, far away.  But that day…that summer morning we would drive into a cloud…a real cloud…so close…It would be all around us. 

I am not certain what I had expected.  I know my anticipation grew with each second.  But I remember the disappointment when our white car entered the fog…  Fog!  How could this be?  Clouds majestic.  Clouds ominous. Clouds special.  But common fog, the stuff you walked through to get to the school bus on cool damp mornings.  Fog! 

Dad explained that fog was a cloud…a low flying one.  But it didn’t help, I had been crushed.  My first life experience with clouds was nothing…nothing new…nothing grand…just driving up into a fog.  I knew fogs…but clouds…well  

I understand clouds better now.  Perhaps the disappointment of that summer morning helped my scientific mind recognize what others had difficulty in seeing.  But it hasn’t helped me, much, with disappointments.  Too often I set a mental image of a thing or an event, only to be brought down by reality…it is only fog.  Too often my senses soar as I approach a grand event or meeting, or whatever, only to be shaken down to reality by…fog.  But fog has not stopped me from dreaming.  Fog has not stopped me from trying to accomplish things others felt certain beyond their reach.  Fog reminds me that things are rarely what they seem and almost never what I think they are worth.  But fog also reminds me that one morning years ago I first drove through a cloud.  That clouds might not have been what I wished they were, whatever that might have been, but I penetrated the great gray mass all the same.

We have expectations.  We will be disappointed.  But we should not give up dreaming, just because they might not come out the way we thought they might.  No, I still look at clouds. I still try to see familiar shapes in their puffy masses.  But I know clouds better…what they are…what they feel like.  Perhaps the childhood magic is lost, but clouds are clouds…They are more than the damp fog that surrounds on some early mornings.  Fog may be clouds that courageously ventured too near the earth.

Some might say I set too high an expectation that morning. It was doomed to fall.  I have fallen may times since.  But high expectations are the only way to reach lofty goals.  Yes, disappointments are a price we all pay, but clouds taught me long ago…it is a price I pay willingly!

 

(611 Words)    5-17-2016