Apologies for interrupting this string of Ogunquit posts, but after a tornado warning and a magnificent rainbow, I was inspired to post this song, a favorite from my childhood. It’s from a time before the rainbow had any other connotation than a covenant with God, a sign of peace, a thing of beauty and wonder. As a gay man, I like what it’s come to represent too. But for me, it will always mean something much simpler, recalling to mind a time of innocence, and childhood.
Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what’s on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it
I know they’re wrong, wait and see
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me…
The childhood bedroom of a boy ~ a boy who loved unicorns and rainbows and books and flowers and Miss Piggy and Tinkerbell and everything that a little boy isn’t supposed to love. A record player that had long-ago worn out the soundtrack to ‘The Magic Garden’ and ‘The Rainbow Connection’, that played the music to which he danced and sang for the only unabashed years of his life. A feather caught on the wind. A windowsill holding a flowering Haworthia. A honeycomb Easter bunny decoration he could not quite bring himself to throw away. These were the things he loved. These were the things that would not hurt him.
Who said that every wish would be heard and answered when wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it. Look what it’s done so far…
What’s so amazing that keeps us star-gazing, and what do we think we might see?
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection ~ the lovers, the dreamers, and me…
This is where laughter was born. This is where tears were shed. This is where pain was first felt. There was innocence and there was shame, there was life and there was death, there was the child and there was the man to come. But on this day, on the comfort of a fluffy cream-colored carpet, ‘The Rainbow Connection’ played on the record player, the black disc spinning round and round, the scratches unnoticed because he was still unbothered. He loved to hear Kermit sing. He wanted to be Miss Piggy, but his heart ached for Kermit – for the outcast, the different, the one who understood why it wasn’t easy being green, and how that shaded everything, and everyone, else around him. He knew the loneliness of being strange, of liking books better than baseball, plants better than playing, the beautiful better than the bodacious, and he knew he would never belong.
All of us under its spell, we know that it’s probably magic…
Have you been half-asleep and have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name.
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailor?
The voice might be one and the same.
I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it, it’s something that I’m supposed to be.
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection ~ the lovers, the dreamers, and me…
Whenever he hears this song, it makes him cry. It brings him back to that room, where he is a boy again. It brings him back to being loved, but still being alone. It brings him back to where he pretends not to be, not to have ever been, and not to ever be again. Mostly, though, it makes him think of the perfect beauty of the rainbow, and the way that beauty never lasts. That’s what he will cry for tonight.
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