On a warm August day during the lazy Summer of 1944, as most 10 year old boys will do, I was stretched out on my back in the small park near my home in upstate New York. What better way to enjoy the day than by chewing a blade of grass and watching the large fair weather cumulus clouds slowly drift across the cobalt blue sky? Although I marveled at their brilliance, it never occurred to me to wonder about their formation, or the scientific make up of these fluffy cotton balls. At ten years of age, I always took my summer clouds for granted.

I first heard, and then saw, a P-47 flying above the cumulus. It would disappear from sight when a cloud intervened, and then reappear against the blue sky. The pilot was probably enjoying a smooth ride above the scattered clouds. Because World War II was still raging in the European and Pacific theaters, I had memorized the silhouettes of aircraft used in the war. A popular cereal packed a small identification card, the silhouette type, in their boxes. The P-47 was committed to memory long ago. I was especially interested in the usual German and Japanese aircraft and had worked hard to memorize their silhouettes. After all, there was no telling when I might see one of these enemy aircraft coming over my city. I would be the first to recognize it and put up the hue and cry to the neighbors —after notifying the authorities, of course. All of this would be to the chagrin of my buddies who couldn't tell a J-3 from a B-17.

I wondered about the pilot in the P-47 flying over my park. Who was he? Where was he going? Had he seen combat? Why was he over my city, over my park for that matter? We didn't get too many military aircraft in our area. How did he get into the Army Air Force and into the enviable position of flying airplanes? Lucky guy. What was he seeing above the clouds? The blue sky above him was clear and the brilliant sun had to be flooding his cockpit, and he must be seeing the tops of the cumulus while I, on the ground, only knew about the bottoms. It struck me that I didn't know what the tops of clouds looked like. The pilot in my P-47 knew. He had seen things from way up there that I could never even imagine. Miles and miles of green countryside, big cities, small towns, plowed fields, the sun glinting off rivers, lakes, and canals; factory smoke stacks belching long streams of white smoke making whatever factories made for the war effort. And he could rest easy in that he knew what the tops of clouds looked like.

That evening at dinner time, I asked my mother and father if they could tell me about the tops of clouds, how they looked. They guessed that the tops looked like the bottoms. But they couldn't be sure, they were as earth bound as I. That night I went to sleep figuring that only pilots knew the mysterious appearance of cloud tops. Because I didn't know any pilots to ask, I would have to go on contemplating this deep mystery which was certainly beyond the ken of earth bound humans, especially a ten-year old. Besides, maybe it was so beautiful up there that pilots wouldn't tell us about it anyway, maybe they would want to keep this sight, enjoyed by a select few, to themselves.