There once was an assortment of small town 'good ol boys' who interfered in my life. Maybe it was from an artistic point of view, I don't know, but I will tell you about them.
They had hobbies. Quite a few hobbies actually, because they were victims of an American Dream gone bad.
You see they had bought the American Dream of dating wild girls in High School and then marrying them when the girls got pregnant even though they knew that those girls would probably grow up to be very much like their mothers, either his mother or her mother, sometimes both.
Then they had the responsibility of keeping a job to pay for the house and cars and furniture and things for the wife and kids, but they were somehow never a real welcome part of the household.
Men were not considered to be good cooks or dishwashers. They didn't even pick out the furniture and mostly what they were needed for was to bring home that money to put in the joint checking account and give everybody their last name for appearances sake.
The men tryed to keep the good times going for their new families but even when they took their wives out to social gatherings, the wives usually grouped together to gossip about their womanly interests and the men were left to talk about sports and cars and work.
At home the men were encouraged to stay out of the way of family life, and sometimes had to whine and complain to get the privelege of sitting in the biggest lazy-boy rocking chair to watch football. The men who were the best at getting their own way sometimes got a chance to stretch out on the couch that was in front of the Television, but that usually let to trouble. There were lots of stories going around about that couch leading to broken marriages and adulterous goings on, so those that valued family values and good reputation, stayed in the hard won lazy-boy rocker or got out of the house to get together with the other men who were tired of sitting in the lazy-boy rocking chair when they were off work.
The 'good ol boys' got to talking amongst themselves about their sorry lives and some of them had some ideas.
They decided not to tell their wives about every raise they got at work. They decided to spend some of their money on things they could do to have fun while they were getting run off from their own houses.
They got involved in messing with cars, and some of them were pretty good at that, but their wives complained about the grease stains on their clothes. They tried hunting but their wifes weren't too crazy about that either, and they knew they had to get more creative without resorting to adulterous affairs that could ruin their lives.
There were some of them that had a knack for electronic type things, and there were lots of manly type toys that were actually electronic equipment. Some of them were good at crafts too, being country types that had somehow found themselves in small towns. They tried remote controlled cars and remote controlled airplanes.
So this particular group of sad 'good ol boys' got more and more involved in electronic toys.
They found radio guns that would melt metal. They already knew about good places to go play with their remote controlled airplanes because that was one of the things that they used as an excuse to get together and experiment and brag and complain and all that.
Well, one of the 'good ol boys' got kind of wild one day and he was showing off with the newest laser gun he had built from a kit to use at his mechanics shop. He just pulled it out of his pick-up truck and started shooting at this and that and he had had a few beers, if you know what I mean.
He shot at the sky up over the pond that they sometimes fished in and then somebody noticed that there were holes in the clouds that he shot at. Something clicked in those bored boys brains. They all took turns at shooting at the clouds. Some of them made some fancy stuff, and the more they tried it the more fun it became. So quite a few of that group of 'good ol boys' got them some laser guns that could be written off the books as mechanics tools. They practiced and practiced their new art.
I hope that they bought cameras with their secret money too, because I didn't have a camera with me when I saw their cloud pictures and fancy rainbows.
You see I was a city girl who got side-tracked in a small town area and didn't really know how to talk to small town people, who were so different from me and my family.
I had always tried to make my husband a useful part and participant in the family. We had waited a while before having children after we were married and we were good friends. As our children grew into fun kids and we got to pull our toys and knick-knacks back out of the closet because the kids were old enough not to put those sharp dangerous things in their mouths by accident, we got to playing the games and sports that we had enjoyed before the children arrived in this world. Our children were boys so they got into painting and glueing together car models and building Lego things, and they played cards, and chess and other board games, and they liked fishing, and bowling, and bb guns, and bows and arrows and computer games. We tried painting too, but it turned out that I was the best at that hobby.
Anyway, while these two sets of different kind of people didn't have much in common, it somehow came about that the 'good ol boy' sky pictures were brought to my attention.
The cloud pictures that I have seen have been done by different artists and there are different styles to them, but some of them were so good that there should be some kind of a prize they should get. Don't you think that a beautiful cloud picture should get a prize?
The biggest cloud picture that I have seen of theirs was a huge eagle with wings outspread over a large portion of the sky. It was was designed on a day that there was a mix of different shades of greyish clouds mixed amongst the fluffy white clouds. It looked like the symbol of the American Eagle that the United States uses.
One of those 'good ol boys' must be kind of religious, because there have been some real fancy religious pictures that are done in a rennaissance style such as the Sistene Chapel that Michealangelo painted.
I don't know if some of those 'good ol boys' are into rock-n-roll music or whether they stick to country honky-tonk, but there was a picture of a horse that was obviously meant to look like 'Bringing Down the Horse' and that is a name of a rock band that was touring at that time.
Once there was a picture of a man smoking a cigar and they made the man wink before the cloud puffs desolved and blew away.
They tried different effects with light prisms too. They put some strange rainbows up in the sky. Once there was a big rainbow that covered a big cloud with pink spokes of radial pink light shooting out from the center. That was on a sunshiny day too.
They knew I was watching the sky and they have sent me messages with their pictures too. Maybe that is a different story and I will tell it later.
Copyright @ 1997 Miki Terry
Links