Imaginations

Who was it that dreamed of this modern life?

Years ago we laid back in the pasture looking at the clouds and we would imagine them as something we knew about whether vaguely or not.

It was so quiet that when the wind blew, the rustling pine needles shocked us for some period that could only be described as “nano-momentarily.” But the quiet itself wasn’t alarming, rather it was expected. You might hear an airplane fly over but it was seldom.

The sounds of a chainsaw felling timber somewhere nearby in the Pineywoods of East Texas, as well as the blast from a shotgun that some hunter fired in some different direction, were not so much marvels as they were expressions of work.

This “computer” contraption I had heard of for many years but it would be way past my “wonder years” when I would finally see one, and into a new decade when I might much less use one.

We would wait patiently, or perhaps not so much, for the three old ladies on our “party line” to get off the phone so that we could make a call. We made fun of those ladies after listening quietly in on their conversations about grape jam and the use of fresh okra.

Perhaps the minds who created modern technology: the Internet and Facebooks of the world had much more imagination than most of us. Those who enlarged the boundaries of medicine that help so many could not have all thought only of the amount of money their inventions would produce.

Likewise, those who made the manned and unmanned weapons of, well, some size of destruction, surely did not do so strictly because they hate their fellow man and woman.

Or so we hope, anyhow.

What does that big cloud in the middle of the sky resemble? A peace symbol? A jet fighter? Or perhaps it reminds us of home and what we did at a different time in life.

You got me there, Bubba!