Sometimes, When Life Hands Us Lemons, God Passes the Sugar

On the way home I looked up and saw a rainbow glowing through the sky in a perfect semi-circle. “Caspita,” I thought. (Another one of those times when I want to say something in Korean, but only Italian rushes to mind.) I stood at the intersection waiting to cross for home. I stood on the corner that had the perfect view of the colorful bowl swooping over the road, over the buildings, and dipping behind.
Gods shoot arrows from this bow. Pulled back, the horizon its string, an arrow could pierce the stars. I stood in awe. The light changed and I went across, only to find that the rainbow had an end. It fell in front of the mountain in the background. I’ve never seen the end of a rainbow. I couldn’t help but smile, teeth showing, at the majesty. I rushed home, grabbed my camera and took to the streets, but the rainbow was gone.
(That's where the rainbow ends... sometimes.)

I decided to duck into an electronics store, as I’m searching for a tape recorder presently. No recorder, I stepped back out.
I wanted to go to that mountain where the rainbow disappeared and while waiting for the crosswalk again, I noticed two people crossing toward me, perpendicular to the way I would go, holding their cellphones up in front of their faces. “Boy,” I thought. “People are always texting here, or doing SOMETHING on their cellphones.” Then a truck drove past with a man hanging out the passenger window holding HIS cellphone in front of his face. “Something must be down that way,” I thought, but couldn’t see. I noticed people down from me all facing the same direction with cellphones in front of their faces. And people crowded on the pedestrian bridge. I crossed, looked to my right, and there was the widest, most pronounced rainbow casting up from the middle of the road in the far distance, up and across and over buildings again. It stopped short of the mountain; I rushed to the bridge.
People stood everywhere on the bridge. People never stop there. But there they stood, cellphones in front of their faces; or if they were lucky, their point-and-shoot.
I walked among them and shot and shot and shot while everyone else did the same, and for those who crossed having not yet seen the phenomenon, they saw one of us, kept walking, then saw the pack of us, and looked. Some of them stopped. For those of us who paused, we felt a part of something. We stood there quietly and lost ourselves in the colors. As for me, my eyes teared when I heard deep breaths drawn in reverence, wonder, awe-struck gasps and “Look!” in Korean tongue. It seemed that everyone stopped, if only a stutter-step, to take in the sight for a little longer. Couples stopped to take a picture, friends stopped and passed the camera as each other gave a Peace sign and smiled excited, myself thinking, “My God,” but unable to say anything beyond that. Moments earlier I sat in the school office thinking how nothing seems to truly make me happy here. Yet, when life hands you lemons... God passes the sugar.
The rainbow was slowly smudged away and the sun had by that time fallen behind the opposite horizon.
I stopped for tea and, on my way home, something held in the air. It would have felt ominous had it not been for the blessings passed to us by that rainbow. The streets were quiet. Many people walked about, but conversations were hushed and no cars passed, no whining mopeds, and of nothing else, John Lennon sang “Imagine” from the speakers of the corner store.


"Going Home"


"It Takes Two" (If you look closely, you'll see a second rainbow faintly on the outside of the first.)


Does anybody notice the lady wearing violet and the man wearing green? :D