Head in the Clouds

                                                              Head in the Clouds

                                                            John Albert Robinson

 8:00 A.M. : Surely a Poet

I first met him when we were ten years old and assigned to the same study group in Tranquility City, our hometown on the Moon. 

At that age, he was already full of rhyme and rhythm, a fount equally of puns and pentameter. 

He loved to make up little ditties about his classmates. These little verses were usually cheerful, even affectionate, for he was blessed with a sunny disposition and a generous spirit.

There was one, though, that was not so kind and the hero of the piece expressed his dissatisfaction in a regrettably practical way. My friend sported a black eye for about a week, which perhaps proved his original point. 

In any case, even at that tender age, he could reel off countless lines of poetry from any century you could name and had a gift for lyrical improvisation. Fast on his mental feet, you might say.

He did well in math and science, too, far outstripping myself, but it was word-play that he lived for, and that particular kind of cleverness that seeks both an audience and applause.   

In his teens he adopted a bohemian life-style: sleeping late, affecting a goatee, and sipping whatever mild intoxicant was in vogue with the young.  

For a time, he aspired to be a rock musician, but a short stint with a weekend band proved that while he had the words, he didn't have the music, or even the look, and he was invited to find his destiny elsewhere. 

If he couldn't be a rock star, then he wanted to be some other kind of artist. Any kind of artist. Honest work, as he used to say with a wink, was not for him. He was too restless for work in a lab or an office and too attached to a life of bohemian leisure to take on the hard jobs like lunar construction or even asteroid prospecting.     

His, shall we say, unorthodox personality also made him unsuited for the military even if he could have made the height requirement, which he couldn't, not by a mile. 

You see, while he surely had the mind and heart of a poet, in body he was an achondroplastic dwarf and stood barely 120 centimeters high.

But poetry doesn't pay, his musical career didn't work out, office work repelled him and one must, after all, eat. With honest jobs ruled out and the lyrical arts, at least for the moment, unremunerative, what was a man to do?   

Why, naturally he became a computer programmer. What else? It was the one long-haired job that could be bent to his erratic whims.

None of this surprised me much, but I was shocked out of my drawers the day I learned he had added 'terrorist' to his resume.

To be continued.