I Saw A Rainbow Today

I suppose I'm keeping up the weather theme, Gentle Reader, since nothing interesting or particularly bitchy is happening in my life these days.  The conditions were rather moist this morning as I went out seeking a coffee shop to sit and draw while sipping the dark roast on tap.  I bypassed as always Tim Horton's.  I never go in there.  I know it is every bit the symbol for Canadian patriotism as hockey and Canadian Tire and maple syrup but I would never be caught dead or alive or in an induced coma inside a Tim Horton's.  Does this make me a snob?  Well...maybe.

What really makes me gag with derision is the way Tim Horton's has finally discovered dark roast coffee.  They have finally come into the 1980's.  Wow! I started drinking dark roast, I think, in 1981, when a neighbour of mine served me my first cup of dark French.  I was hooked, sold and transformed into a deliriously willing slave of that fabulously aromatic, complex and musky quality of roasted coffee bean.  There has been no turning back.

I ended up at Melriche's on Davie Street, a local hip coffee shop where I have had perhaps seven art shows since they opened in the nineties.  I was their opening artist in 1994. I'd been painting for only a year and already was producing a decent body of work.  A young woman saw my paintings and became my agent, securing me a dandy little commission that paid for my first trip to Costa Rica.  That's all it took to get me obsessed with becoming fluent in Spanish.

I saw a rainbow today.  It wasn't full on brilliant and blindingly polychromatic, but rather faint, faded and tentative, like a very shy child peaking from behind a half-shut door.  I paused, stopped, strained my neck only longing wishing and employing all my psychic forces to will it into a strong showing of blinding colour.  It strengthened a little then faded like a happy sigh into the blue sky.

This evening my friends, who have recently immigrated to this country, disclosed to me that they are pregnant, expecting their first child.  I remember the rainbow and now I am smiling.