When I was a kid I used to imagine a world in the clouds.

It was largely brought about by the cartoon images of heaven, with angels sitting atop a puffy cloud and playing harps. The images in my head were less of a cartoon but still a four-year-old’s fantasy. The clouds were a place people went after they died. When I got a little older, five or six, they were a place where Martin Luther King, Jr., and all sorts of other famous, good people went and mingled.

The place in the clouds was very plain – clouds that stretched for miles without end, white and fluffy, but the people there didn’t need anything more. God was there and he walked freely among everyone, less of a solid being than a spirit, something my four-year-old brain, still completely entrenched in the material, couldn’t fully comprehend.

When I was seven or eight I learned that those pretty puffy white clouds were, in fact, called cumulus clouds, and they were not puffy strands of heavenly matter but, in fact, were made up of tiny specs of water. Heaven evaporated. Like the north pole and the deepest parts of the ocean, though, the clouds still held their mystique.

When I was twelve I flew for the first time. We flew up, above the clouds, above heaven, in a matter of minutes. We broke through into the sunlight and looked down at the white, insubstantial mist far below.

There was no world beyond the clouds. It was only fog. Once we’d broken through and were back on the ground again, the wisps still clinging to the wings had melted away, as insubstantial as a dream.