A Brief Look at Rainbows, Arcs and Snowflakes

Long Beach could be called the Rainbow City, I used to tell people, because the city has so many of them. At least that was the way it used to seem to me. The local paper, The Press Telegram, would print staff and reader's photos. I clipped those brightly colored pictures out of the paper to save to a scrapbook. My favorite was one taken facing north showing the city's tall downtown buildings with the snow topped mountain range in the background. Due to smog, those mountains are not seen during the summer months, only on clear, cooler winter days. Can not recall the last time I saw a rainbow in Long Beach. Maybe it is due to all those smokers being forced outdoors to indulge their habit polluting the outside air.

As is my wont I have a more simplistic approach to life. "Sun shines were love grows" is my belief. It started during a torrential downpour the day a sister's divorce became final. Wrote a poem, "Another marriage bites the dust and god does not like to see the fuss, rains his tears on all of us". Coming upon the Pollyannaish ditty about sunshine, I started comparing people's moods~or my mood~to the moods of the weather. It is not the smoker's smoke but the culture of hate that has sprung up in the United States following the NYC World Trade Center tragedy, that has created this sudden lack of those beautiful rainbows.

Driving to my daughter's one Christmas morning, I spotted a small rainbow hovering just above the area of sky near her apartment. It appeared in a cloudless, typical sunny Long Beach sky, just as Stevie Wonder's Christmas Song started playing on the radio. "Maybe not in time for you and me, but someday at Christmas time", he sang. Rainbows need both the sunshine and rain to appear, so I took it as a sign from God. Tears welled in my eyes as Stevie sang on, "no hungry children, no empty hands". Hope you know the song, because this is a brief look at rainbows, arcs and snowflakes, not Christmas songs.