Rainbows

As we ooze into adulthood, too many of us lose that sense of wonder we had as children. For, as children, the everyday humdrum is not so everyday, nor so humdrum, as we have experienced very little beyond our front doors. But we grow up. We get out of the house. We go to school. We learn about the science and technology that make up the world around us.

We learn how everything works that ever made us stop and scratch our heads, or made us say, “Aw, COOL!” And as the knowledge enters our brains, the wonder leaves.

Today started off as the typical Monday. It wasn’t a usual Monday as we had workers coming over to start a project at the house, and they were late. I had to wait for them to arrive to go over the areas where they were to work, pose and answer questions and whatnot. But they were late, making me late for work, to deal with rain-crazy traffic, which made me later for work, and that is the typical Monday.

But as traffic cleared and I headed northwest, the sun peeked out, giving promise to the day. I noticed something in the sky ahead of me to my left: a band of colors canted at an angle, floating in the sky. “Prism effect of the sun through the rain,” my brain automatically reminded me. But then, when I looked forward I had the illusion of driving toward a vast archway. I looked up and there it was, arching from the ground way off to the left of the highway, over the road, and down to the ground way off to the right, a complete rainbow! I hadn’t seen one of those in at least thirty years. I looked around at the drivers on either side of me, but no one seemed to have noticed my rainbow. It lasted a good three or four minutes, and I continuously marveled at it as I hurtled along the highway at 75 miles per hour (but that’s okay, as I am the world’s best driver).

I returned momentarily to an amalgam of all of my grade school classrooms, imagining the voice of a teacher explaining the science of a rainbow. “Blah blah blah sunlight blah blah blah refraction blah blah blah prism blah blah.” But once you’ve seen one in all its glory, the scientific explanation doesn’t seem sufficient. It became very easy to understand the origins of the folklore of rainbows, as they are so magnificent, people of centuries ago must have desired to touch them, to see them up close. The area where it “touched” the ground seemed to be illuminated in a sort of spotlight, but I’m sure it was more trick of the mind than trick of the eye. Nonetheless, it lent to the sense of magic that I experienced.

All too soon it was gone and I was once again aware that I was headed to work. On a Monday. And a rainy Monday at that. Any magic that rainbows may possess, now or during my childhood, disappears with the rainbows, as my Monday turned out to be worse than the average Monday. Unless the magic of the rainbow is the smile worn on your soul, no matter how lousy is your day, when the image of the rainbow arches across your memory.


dassall