The Rainbow

July 11, 2022

Mid-summer dawn breaks in northwestern South Carolina with a damp, delicate coolness. By midafternoon we’re close to or above 90F, a hot breeze wafts the heat. A few evenings ago it rained hard, raising steam on the asphalt. Thunder cracked, lightening flashed. Afterward a rainbow stretched across the sky. A rainbow—mythical beacon of hope, or odd atmospheric illusion. Depends on your point of view.

The parching heat is a small trial alongside the nightmares that afflict so many others. Here on our quiet street, we get off easy. We hardly ever think about someone showing up with an AR-15. That could change at any moment.

Our next idea for getting away is a visit to son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline, near Philadelphia. We went three years ago, in July 2019, a weekend that turned into ten days when Sandy landed in Bryn Mawr Hospital with microstrokes. She felt numb, Caroline rushed her to the ER, then to the ICU. She’s still on the meds they gave her.

We went up again for Thanksgiving that year and got a sweet taste of southeastern Pennsylvania at the Brandywine battlefield, where in September 1777 the Brits whipped the Yanks and seized Philly for a while. We couldn’t miss the Wyeth Gallery at Chadd’s Ford, which shows portraits and landscapes of Andrew Wyeth, America’s greatest realist with watercolor and tempera, and the work of his father, N.C. Wyeth and sisters Henriette and Caroline, all luminous in their gifts.

It will be another road trip. The most direct route is I-85 to Petersburg, Va., then I-95, the north-south commercial grind. We’ll take our usual Southern escape route, I-26 to Johnson City, Tenn., then I-81 to Harrisburg. Then the Penn. Turnpike the rest of the way.

Like everyone else, we’re struggling to keep our lives carved out from the dreck of public life: automatic weapons for sale, no questions asked, to mentally ill teenagers; inflation wrecking budgets as people spend down two years of covid subsidies. The Supreme Court ruling killing off Roe v. Wade took over all the headlines and probably the talk shows, which I don’t watch. The Court then dumped EPA authority on “major policy questions” about climate change on Congress, promising more legal snarl, more polluted air.

One refuge from all that, in the cranky, obscure way I look at things, is Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” It goes like this, more or less: two waiters, at their café late at night, talk about the last customer, an old deaf man. He was a little drunk.

“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.

“What about?”

“Nothing. He has plenty of money.”

The younger waiter went over to the old man.

“Another brandy,” the old man said.

“You’ll be drunk,” the waiter said.

The waiter poured a glass full of brandy. The old man motioned with his finger. “A little more,” he said. The waiter poured the brandy into the glass so that the brandy slopped over.

“Thank you,” the old man said.

The waiters talk about the old man, how he tried suicide with a rope, his niece cut him down.

“He must be eighty years old,” one waiter said. “He stays up because he likes it.”

“He’s lonely, I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.”

“He had a wife once, too.”

“I wouldn’t want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing.”

“This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, while drunk. Look at him.”

The old man looked over at the waiters. “Another brandy,” he said. The waiter who was in a hurry came over. “Finished,” he said. “No more tonight. Close now.”

The old man stood up, took a leather coin purse from his pocket and paid for the drinks, leaving a half a peseta tip. The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man, walking unsteadily but with dignity.

The unhurried waiter asks the younger one why he wouldn’t let the old man stay and drink. “I want to go home,” the man said.

“I am one of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”

He goes on. “This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well-lighted.”

“Good night,” says the younger waiter. “Good night,” the other said.

Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing he knew all too well. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order.

The waiter descends into a sort of blackness. He understands the café matters, order, cleanliness, courtesy matter. A place to sit late at night and sip a quiet brandy matter, for those who come.

We all need our clean, well-lighted place. It could be a silent chapel that conveys the mystery of God’s grace to strengthen us against the bleakness and pretensions of public life. Then too, the humility of the old waiter, which is his power, can teach and sustain us.  

I thought of the waiter when I finished simple things: I wound new line onto the spinning reels I had given my grandsons, attached them to the rods, and stowed them carefully against the day I’ll take them fishing. A small thing done.

It was another warm morning. I took the compost out to the yard and stacked tools where they belong.  I stopped for a few moments and breathed deeply. It was quiet, no hint of a breeze. I remembered the rainbow that flashed briefly across the sky the day before. I looked around the yard, and shielded my eyes against the sun.