Clouded Memories

Memories fade. Since I have been bird watching and nest monitoring I've realized just how fast. It is not common to come across an original memory that is 40-50 years old as most memories that age may be memories of a memory. Recently  I recalled a memory from over 50 years ago, that I had not thought of since it happened.  I don't know exactly what stimulated this but it was related to the aviaticus clouds we see often in this modern sky.

I've heard it a few times, someone who was a sky watcher back in the '60's say, there were no persistent aviation clouds back then...no, there were, we just do not remember, we do not remember because they were not aviation clouds to the young observer, just clouds, linear clouds.

The sky was however different in those days.  The sunsets were awesome, blazing with colors, reds, yellows and oranges that morphed purple before becoming gray.  It was my belief then, as a child, that God painted each sunset and I would marvel at the creative beauty and wished they would last. Sunset was a time of peace and the colors were a seal of the promise of another great day to come, the next day. By today's standards, even a bit by the standards of those days, we were poor, materialistically speaking.  But it was my belief, we lived in the greatest state of the greatest country in the world and at sunset I would say to myself and my Creator, how could I be so fortunate?  Even food took a lower priority to that. The air was thick with life, when there was food, at times it felt like it was a bother to have to stop to eat.

In 1973, I saw my last awesome sunset. it was fall, it was during the Israeli-Arab War and looking out the barrack's window at Fort Dix, it appeared half the sky was lit with blazing colors and beams of light. I never saw another one even remotely close since and the youthful feeling of peace at sunset has never returned.  Well almost true. Several months ago I opened my mind to the idea again that God created the beautiful sunsets and though not coming close to the startling beauty of those sunsets of the 1960's, that early evening I saw the greatest sunset since those days, fairly glorious and large but still lacking those brilliant colors. So my point, the sky was different back then.

So this week I recalled a linear cloud I had seen in my youth, never had I thought of it since until then. Not only had I recalled the sight in my mind but I recalled as if back to that moment that I had seen clouds like it many times before. It was just looking in the sky, not asking 'I wonder why that cloud is long?' but somehow knowing it was different, enough to remember it after 50+ years. Who would remember such a thing?  Can anyone look back 50 years and remember the shape of any particular cloud? I was like the others, we just did not have the aviation clouds back then. Wrong, we did, but we did not process them as man-made, they were clouds. nothing more and the thought never occurred that they were caused by jet exhaust.  Next: Why so many more now?