I was five years old and the sky was big and blue and boring, but not nearly as boring as my father, who was standing next to me at the time talking to a man about something tedious and financial. So I let my eyes wander across the concrete, the asphalt, the steel, and finally traced my way up, up, up into that blue blank above my head, filled with puffy white shapes. A rabbit, a dinosaur, a bone. One waved at me. A tree, a mountain. One waving at me.
I checked one more time. The cloud – a somewhat wispy and remarkably tiny specimen, more of a cloudlette – waved a bit more firmly. I understood, with the absolute certainty of a five-year-old, that it was definitely waving at me and no one else. I informed my father of this, of course, but he provided no comment, and by the time we had reached home the cloud was missing. This irritated me, but not so much as to be left grumpy after a nice dessert.
I was ten and knew absolutely everything, something my math teacher was shortly to disabuse me of. I was making snow angels in the fourteen square feet that composed our backyard to celebrate this, heedless of the harm my idle games were doing to my future chances of constructing a snowman, looking up at the sky and seeing how big a puff of vapour I could blow in the subzero air. Pretty big, it was, and it showed up nice and clear against that December sky, empty as hollow could be.
Except that one cloud, waving at me. It was bigger, it was a bit sleeker, its wispy sidetrails had filled out into a bushy and well-rounded bulk, but it was still that cloud that had given me an instant’s entertainment on a dull day half a lifetime ago.
I waved back, of course, and was pleased to see it shiver most happily in a foggy sort of way. It looked all alone up there in that empty sky, and I hoped that it was doing alright. It certainly seemed sure of itself as it set out, staying low and close to the horizon for safety as winter twilight set in, ready to let all the cold, old stars out to peer down at everything. I watched it until it was too dark to see, then a bit longer, and then my father dragged me in and told me to stop being ridiculous or I’d freeze my nose off, which sounded very unpleasant.
I was twenty and hated everything a little bit still, but that was starting to strike me as annoying and a waste of effort, along with my degree, my off-and-on relationship, and my continued existence. I certainly wasn’t planning to do anything about any of those, though, because that would take some sort of effort, and effort was a hard thing, a wrong thing, especially on a day like this with the fog rolling in and hugging the whole city as close as a teddy bear. No, to coast was the safe move here, to glide on your past and ride the broad-beamed rail of your habits until it ran out from under your feet. So I sat at my desk and let my papers go unwritten and watched the world roll by, from the little cars running down the streets (invisible except for their lights, and on some old clunkers not even that) to the yelling people on the corners (sounding like their mouths had been muffled with socks) to the big billowing gusts of fog that were eeling past my window, thick as smoke and damper than a fish’s breath.
One particular strand of it was patting against the window most insistently.
I opened it up and the whole mess poured inside. A cloud up close is a chilly, moist thing that smells of birds and water, and it set me to shivering even as we caught up on old times. It had grown spectacularly, and in its eagerness to say hello it filled my entire apartment building from tip to top. Complaints followed the next day, but I wasn’t quite stupid enough to be the one willing to admit opening a window.
I was forty and out on a business trip, all the way up in a big flying can in the air and being bored by a man in a suit who wouldn’t stop talking to me about things that were tedious and financial. I dearly wished that I were important enough to ignore him, but as my position was I had to nod my head at least once a minute and make the occasional throat-clearing noise. Because of this, although it was a surprise when the plane lurched in the sky, it was also a very welcome distraction and I became quite happy. As the man in the suit hammered all the buttons on his chair, eager to have someone to complain to, I leaned towards the window and looked outside over the broad shiny sweep of our wings.
There was my friend again, a towering thunderhead, ruler of all the miles its blackened bulk surveyed, and with a gravity and pompousness that matched its exalted position exactly. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurd size it’d reached in its wanderings, only now fully visible to me at its natural altitude, and I think it did too, a big rumbling roar of a chuckle that bounced us about like a bowl of eggs on the lap of an anxious vegan. My seatmate did not approve in the slightest, but I was hard pressed to care as the flight wore on, only feeling the slightest hint of melancholy as we slipped away from the heights and dropped into the world down below.
Now I am eighty years old, and find myself retired and at loose ends all around, with a stable of grandchildren, a missing spouse, an awful lot of Christmas cards taking up room on my refrigerator, and a coming anniversary. It took me an awful long time to catch the pattern; too busy to pause and think, to gather up woolly old hints from a long time ago, and to compare dates.
It’s time about for an anniversary, I guess, which is why I’ve rented a boat. The weather reporters are making an awful fuss about this, and I’d better go say hello out at sea or there could be a bit of a mess for everyone else. I’m proud of what my friend’s made of itself, I really am, but it’s a bit too large to squeeze itself into an apartment building anymore. Or a state.
As panicky as those weathermen were, it was rather nice of them to give my friend a name – as old as it is, it has no business being a stranger like that. Charlotte, the third of its kind of the year, right? That’s how they name them.
Such a pretty name; I think I have a granddaughter called that, if I’m not mistaken.
I will have to congratulate it.