Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/wBP_IgYPlsM
or read his tale…
INCARCERATING THE PINK AND AQUA-EDGED YELLOW STRIPE RAINBOW
Just standing here at the edge of my 1906-built home on the big city’s south side, old time lyrics creep into my unfiltered mind, “It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea…”
I look out over the carpenter-gothic and condo-lined street and await the arrival of my true love.
It’s a generational rumble, this little avenue of leftover dreams. The modern structures on one side, the ancient wooden houses on the other, facing off each day and actually getting along, coexisting just fine.
My gaze drifts upward to take in something prettier than phone and cable line criss-crossings and teetering wooden support poles and fractured sidewalks and potholed battlefields and grammatically-challenged signage.
Up, up in the Maxfield Parrish clouds a rainbow fades itself into existence. For a few minutes, that’s all I can see, all I care to see.
Can I see it on your behalf?
This particular rainbow has no specified beginning, an invisible ending way beyond, but in between sports its colors. The three stripes begin on the upper edge with a light rose pink kind of effect. The lower track is aqua, almost transparent. Between is a remarkable lemon-yellow stripe rendering the other colors unable to collide and conflict. No rumble here, this day at least.
The lyrics keep repeating themselves in a Nat King Cole-Ella Fitzgerald amalgam, ”It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea…”
I find myself smiling without benefit of audience, without any attempt to please anybody else. I’m just smiling at this wonderful, pure sight hovering blissfully out of reach of the day to day toil and disarray of the village, the admixture of life and dream, reality and illusion.
If I capture this mirage, firefly it in a jar, will it die of incarceration? Will it no longer exist because of my interference?
I leave the rainbow alone, it leaves me alone. We regard each other and exist in peace.
And for a few ticks of the celestial timepiece, all is calm, all is bright
© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed