From rain to rainbows

Blog 1903 – 12.10.2020

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From rain to rainbows

Today’s book is not actually a children’s book but the child in all of us needs to be reminded and often that rainbows follow the rain. I have in my now over nineteen hundred blogs touched on the subjects of rain and rainbows many time, even just recently. But certain truths bear repeating and this is one, that rain and rainbows are inseparable.

Over thirty two years ago a seeming random decision to attend a small college reunion gathering with a couple of friends lead to an afterwards dining experience with a larger group where I became reacquainted with a lovely woman that I had met briefly years before. Since that time my life became willingly entwined with hers and I believe that for all our yet differences of opinion on a multitude on things that on one thing we still agree, being together is always better than being apart. She more than any other person in all of my life has won a forever part in my play and in my heart.

Over the last nine years of my traveling work life we have spent most of it apart but only in miles never in the distance that truly matters, heart. I have told the story often of how I spent most of my last teenaged year in South Vietnam believing that my first pretty young wife was waiting for me back home to sadly stop receiving letters from her four months before I got to return home there to find out for sure what I was not told but already knew, that she had found somebody else. It is an all too familiar story, mine differing from most only in that I never received the classic Dear John letter that some military servicemen do and perhaps military service women as well, Dear Joan letters in their cases.

I am forever glad and grateful for all of my life experiences, even that one, but especially to have found my rainbow after that and several other hard rains in my Linda Lee. Our life together has not been all blue skies and sunshine. We have had our share of dark nights, cloudy, stormy, rainy days too, but, I think in both our hearts there has been this lasting rainbow that makes it more than worth it all.

One of our favorite movies is Sabrina. Linda prefers the newer 1995 one with Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond while I equally enjoy the 1954 black and white classic one with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn. What we both love most about the movie is the love story and Paris. I have promised Linda that before our journey together here is over that I will take her to Paris. This almost year with Covid-19 and without work has, for us as it has for many people, put a crimp in our plans, but we still look forward to realizing our Paris dream and many others yet together in the future.

I happened upon the attached painting before we were forced as so many to isolate ourselves to stay safe and bought it for my wife to remind her of my intention to keep my promise. I still believe that I will be working soon and though parting from Linda will probably be the hardest “see you later” either of us have ever shared I believe the time apart will be short and that a red umbrella and a special Paris rainbow still await us. As Bogie told another sweetheart in another movie, “We will always have Paris.”