Robin , from The New Dharma Bums wrote this morning about a shape her brother had seen in the clouds. Kind of cool that he saw a robin shape in the clouds for his twin Robin.
Well, this reminded me about an incident where children were looking for shapes in the clouds.
I was hitch hiking back to my school in mid November of my first teaching year. I was picked up about 2:00 PM by a young family that was on a long road trip. I was in the back seat with two young kids around five years old. They were super little kids. One thing their parents did to keep the kids amused was to look for shapes made by clouds. They were occupied with this activity for an hour until it became completely overcast and they couldn't see cloud shapes. Then they looked at books they had.
I was with these people for about 100 miles when I had to take a different road. By now it was around 4:00 PM . I had to walk for about 45 min before I could start hitch hiking again. A couple of famers picked me up in their truck and gave me a ride of 20 miles before they turned off in the country They had taken a load of pigs to town. By now it was completely dark. It might have been a highway but it was rural and very little traffic after dark. One car passed me and that was it. I could see a village about 5 miles away so I started walking.
The village was quiet. No one was on the streets. The businesses were all closed . But wait there was one place with dim lights on. The Chinese Cafe was open. This cafe did not even have electricity but it did have a phone booth. I phoned one of the farmers in my school district to come and get me. About an hour later he showed up and I got to my land lady's house about 11:00 PM.
It was an afternoon that I'll never forget.
