Last evening while driving from home to my art studio for a painting session, the clouds to the east grew dark at twilight. Then the sun broke through from the west and caught the edge of the clouds. Up from the earth rose a segment of rainbow.

I thought I’d seen the most beautiful sight last night. Yet this morning a friend named Sean Patrick Macadams posted an even more striking photo of a rainbow sighted just eight miles northeast, in St. Charles. His image showed a double rainbow with copper colored light bouncing around the atmosphere. So, so beautiful!

It appears Sean captured his image in Pano mode with his phone. Yesterday I used the same technology while out on the golf course with my brother-in-law. The pattern of the clouds in the sky echoed the pattern of the sand trap below.  I love the idea that we live in parallel universes.

It’s amazing to be able to carry around a small camera capable of capturing such images. Then the ability to instantly share them with the world? Mind-boggling. The days of waiting a week for film to develop are gone. Yet the days of being so preoccupied with capturing every second of our lives in digital reality are here.

We had a runner on our college cross country team named Bill Higgins. He was a military vet that had served in Okinawa coming off the Vietnam War. So he was a 26-year old junior in college watching us dumb kids run our heads off and make fools of ourselves drinking too much most weekends. We lovingly nicknamed him Colonel, and he took on the role of chronicling our racing and training trips as well.

At one point I was offered a box of slides that were being handed through the team because Colonel didn’t really want them. I really regret not accepting those images. They would be an interest psychographic study of those years in the 70s.

The film itself was probably Ektachrome, one of the alternate film types available for slides. It tended toward the cooler side of exposure. Kodachrome was warmer, and used quite often for film. I may be wrong about, but it is largely moot. All those film types are nearly obsolete. The Kodak company no longer rules photography. All of that old technology has vanished somewhere over the rainbow.

There are a few images from the slide film and Kodachrome era that I’ve been able to keep over the years. Two of them I found in a drawer one day after the big cleanout that happened last year during my move. This steeplechase shot was taken by Colonel Higgins in 1976 during a sodden steeplechase at the Luther College Invitational.

It has occurred to me that even these images will someday not have much significance. Perhaps my children might like to keep a few. But the press and the clippings? Other than raw numbers on fragile paper, they are most likely not that valuable to anyone.

But they still mean something to me. They are part of the rainbow of existence. They capture this parallel life between how we’re living and what we remember of it. Then it all goes somewhere over the rainbow.