Above Us

I have a friend from college who used to trip over sidewalk cracks and such because she was always looking up.

It sounds like the makings of a kid's book, "the girl who had her head in the clouds," but Suzette has always been quite grounded intellectually. I don't know if she still glances skyward all the time anymore, the ground under her skies being Deutchland's and our contact's having been broken for about three years (to my regret; Google, etc. have not been helpful so far). (You like my gerund, you like my nonparallel construction that runs that gerund right after another nonessential possessive? Getting a kick out of my parenthetical punctuation creations, too?)

Adults rarely kick back and stare at the clouds on purpose. The last time I remember lying down to watch the sky was during the 2001 annual fall meteor showers.

Babies watch the sky from their carseats all the time, and I enjoy a good "you drive me" experience, too. The land-fields and sky-field attached to Missouri's major east-west/west-east thoroughfare are not spectacular views, though, so when we drive home (eastward) next weekend, I don't have much to look forward to those four hours besides the counting of birds of prey.

There is also the counting of X's, for Missouri's Interstate 70 is home to a number of lovely places such as the Million Dollar Fantasy Ranch. Recent legislation has reduced the number of "you're almost there" billboards, and now, the lonely trucker runs the terrible risk of missing CDL-discount announcements and only has a few miles to consider each Adult Toy and Video and/or LIVE GIRLS establishment before pulling off, so to speak.

Anyway, they are always done in boring, block lettered fonts in flashy black, white, bright green, pink, etc., these billboards that share air-space with a huge M - I - Z - Z - O - U series, a Behlman or something car dealership series, the "Feeling Sick, Think It Might Be Something You Ate?" one, some radio station ads, a few funeral home "don't drink and drive" ones, and obviously nothing that I have ever enjoyed reading. For a while, we had the God series, the white-on-black one-liners like, "Don't make me come down there," or, "That 'love thy neighbor' thing, I wasn't kidding."

God never commented on the Million Dollar Fantasy Ranch.