Monday Mimisms: Looking For a Candle In a Hurricane

“I'd be afraid to be in an airplane. I think I might fall down,” said my blue-eyed baby boy, as I showed him the pictures I snapped from the seat of the airplane that recently took me home to Bloggingham Palace.

"I like that one!” he grinned.
“Why?” I asked.
“It's bumpy,” he said.

Had I known just how bumpy the ride home would be when I snapped these photos, I might have opted for a parachute. By 7:30 the next morning, I not only needed a way out of a royal confusion, but a crystal ball would have come in handy as well, complete with a neat little storage bin for anger and a pocket for disbelief. I'll spare you the details.
Just call the child prodigious. Clairvoyant. Profoundly prophetic.

A firmly planted kiss on my left cheek, without my asking, from the four-year-old love of my life – for his “mimi” - told me all I need to know about love; the unconditional kind - borne of innocence and trust. Oh. Yes.

Thank God it still exists.
Before that sweetest of kisses, I wasn't so sure.

“What does this cloud look like?” I asked him.
“I could walk on it!” he said in his big-boy voice.

Ah....but could you trust it to hold you up?”

questioned the disillusioned Queen.
“Maybe.....What do YOU think, Mimi?”

I was in no humor to wax philosophical. I could barely hold him on my lap, nor did I think I could do justice to his heavy-weighted questions. In fact, I had more questions than he.
I know little about clouds, even less about the fragility of nature or the whims of a brewing battle – real or imagined. Apparently, I have no judgment when it comes to changing winds at all.

But trust?
In a cloud?
That's something told in fairy tales. Isn't it?

The clouds in my airplane world began to rain this week – literally that night on the way home as our small plane was tossed about, caught in an unexpected windstorm. Then barely before I got home, another fierce storm broke. Swimming in overwhelming floods is not my forte. My blue-eyed boy had questions for which I had no answers. Or do I? asked the rambling Queen of Bloggingham.

Oh, will you please get to the point, Mimi?

What are you babbling about?

And so she struggled to answer her little man's questions.
She wanted to calm his fears. But today, the Queen had no answers.
His fears were imaginary. Her grownup fears were not.
How could I answer his wide-eyed curiosity when I, myself, could not even trust a cloud?

They look like clouds. They move like clouds. They sing like clouds. But are they?

How does one ever really know?

If you touch them, will they break?
If you love them, will they cry?
And why does the earth seem to tilt when you change directions?

How do you know if you will ever get back straight again?
Is it in the hands of the one you trust to steer it right?

Or yours......

“What are they made of?” he asked.
“Vapors and such,” I told him.
“What's a vapor?”
“Let's just say that some clouds are stronger than others, Little Man."

Questions. Questions. From a four-year-old. Would they ever end? My little guy's musings were not nearly as important as my own, I thought. I am much older. And still I have no answers. Just more ruminations of which I tire.

So, back to my blue-eyed baby boy. What was it again? Oh yes.
Trusting clouds.

And pilots.

And airplanes.

And people.

When he is older and ready for a brutally lucid grown-up opinion on the fragile deceptions of the heart, to which I have quite unexpectedly acquired a great deal of perception of late, perhaps I'll tell him this:
It is not the clouds you have to fear. Nor the sky you can't trust. It's not the promise of rain you can't believe in or the brilliant rays of this sunset on the horizon. It's not the beauty of this skyline that will change. Nor the sun.

 Nor the wind. Nor the bumpity clouds you see.
They are constant.

But people, my dear boy, now that's a different landscape.
And don't ever, baby boy, never ever
look down
Or you really might fall
and that could be very dangerous indeed
You might find out
That some clouds are only smoke and mirrors
Nothing more

It's not about trusting all the clouds, dear one.

But finding one – just one – that you can trust.

Ah....that's the rub.