Driving home tonight from Petaluma, it was just at that moment when the sun had set and the clouds were still pinkish. And off to the left of the freeway those clouds were amazingly structural. In one way, you could see them as large teeth, complete with roots. Wide at the top, narrowing down to the root structure. But as a former English teacher, with all those grammar rules embedded in my psyche, I saw those clouds as punctuation symbols.
Those clouds formed huge exclamation symbols and huge semicolons. Those clouds formed gigantic parenthesis and they formed amazing commas and apostrophes. Those clouds were pinkish when I first found them, and so seemed cherubic almost. But after driving just a mile or two that pinkish glow faded away and gave way to a dark, gloomy gray color. Those punctuation marks, those huge colons and apostrophes, now in dark gray, almost looked better, more usable, more appropriate. They looked much more like symbols of grammar and less like ethereal clouds.
I liked seeing a sky of punctuation marks, it isn't often you see that sort of thing in the sky. I might have been the only person on the freeway at that moment who thought of those clouds in that way. That fact makes me oddly happy.
!@?"#:
No comments:
Post a Comment