He could tell by the woman's deeply creased, too tanned face and froggy voice;
she would lite up as soon as they landed.
Looking down, big things became smaller.
That reminded him of the only time,
he ever saw the shadow of his plane passing over a vast nubby carpet of clouds.
It was like the first time he peed in the woods.
Something more magnificent and powerful was occurring; he just wasn't sure what it was ?
Now that he was airborne, he looked for markers that would be an absolute indication where he was.
He looked for roads, highways, rivers and lakes.
Bodies of water were particularly fascinating.
From above, the blues, greens and purples seemed to paint an abstract of the water's depths.
Another palette called out to the sandbars that ribbed the coast.
Below him stretched out farmland, cities, baseball diamonds and gravel pits.
The predictability of the suburbs displayed patterns of small geometric dots.
People lived in those dots.
At night, the greenish street lights lit the roadways, and the whiter beams of cars made a slow procession of flickering lights.
In remote regions, he liked to follow trails that might wind around mountain terrains.
It was like tracing spirals in the sand.
Sometimes they might lead to a fabulous resort or a stunning lodge or just an old abandoned cabin.
The pathways he liked the best, were the ones that led nowhere.
They were like a pointless conversation, that just trailed off.
He was particularly interested in seeing golf courses, sports stadiums and nude sunbathing.
Fortunately, there were a lot of golf courses.
The fluffy white clouds could be conjured into an elephants, squirrels or manatees.
Once they were at cloud level he wondered if he actually believed in heaven ?
Making up animals or believing in the afterlife were really very different measurements of certainty.
Something he did learn; was water vapor forms tiny droplets or ice crystals, about 0.01 mm in diameter.
Clouds become visible when billions of icy crystals are suspended in the atmosphere above earth.
Every day he looked up into the sky and listened to the clouds.
He wondered what people thought they meant, when they talked about heaven.
Talking and believing are so different.
He wondered if people knew, that heaven was a place for hydrogen molecules.
