On a cloudy day, you can see forever

On a drive down I-65 toward downtown Indianapolis one day, I spotted a panoramic sky view to the left. The sunrise had left some lingering color, and the cloud formation looked like those windswept sand ridges you see on desert sand. Right in the middle of those cirrus formations was a huge glob of cumulus fluff.

This cloud glob stood out against the rest of the sky as if designed to be showcased, and I couldn’t resist the urge to make a Rorschach interpretation – deciding it looked like a seal with flippers down for balance and nose in the air as if ready to balance a ball.

I admit I was pleased with myself for coming up with such a whimsically accurate figure. The more I looked at the cloud sculpture, the more clearly it couldn’t be interpreted as anything else. It was dead on.

However, as I drove through an overpass and the road curved a little, I noticed the big cloud had morphed into the shape of a large sea lion, in pretty much the same position.

Amazing scenic wonder, I thought, then looked away.

A few minutes later I looked back, and the cloud had become a great white shark, half thrust from the watery depths in a shark version of a roar. I stared in wonder.

Eventually I had to look at the road again (for you see, I was supposed to be driving) but when I looked back again, it had changed to yet another shape, this time from shark to a bottle nose dolphin – there was clearly now a bulging forehead behind a long thin snout.

The driver ahead of me made an unexpected lane change and forced my attention back to the business of manning my automobile. Thus startled into road safety, I went a few miles down the road before I remembered to look back at the cloud mass – which was now completely on the other side of the road, and was most definitely the shape of a schnauzer.

I was getting very close to the downtown area by this point, and knew I would soon have to permanently turn my attention away from the cloud to navigate the various lane changes and exits ahead. In my last glance, though, I discovered two things about the extraordinary cloud mass: Number One – it was now a roaring T-Rex with a goatee; and Number Two – it was not a cloud at all, but rather a large belching mass from some factory smokestack.

For a split second I was embarrassed by my silly, sentimental misinterpretation of “nature’s” amazing beauty. But then I remembered everything was okay because I was in the car all by myself – in the only place on earth I can safely be a rock star. That meant no one else ever had to know (at least until I published it).

In the next second I was giggling at mankind's universal dorkiness. Who hasn’t been caught red-handed being high-handed?

And thus self-comforted, I ended up being 15 minutes late for my meeting because I’d been fiddling with the radio to find the 80s station, and was too busy belting out a song by Pat Benatar to notice I’d missed my exit.

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