You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The end of the rainbow.
It’s the place where Shangri La meets nirvana.
It’s the X on life’s treasure map that signifies you’ve found what you are looking for.
It’s a perfectly cooked hamburger with a harmonic blend of mayonnaise, ketchup and yum.
The end of the rainbow is the place where the Leprechaun dances a jig on his pot of gold.
It’s the place where laughter and contentment do the lambata on a warm breeze.
I’m currently sitting 2,500 miles away from the rainbow.
I’m in a bar illuminated by neon and fluorescent lights.
The frequency of luminescence in this bar is hardly conducive to rainbows and unicorns.
A rainbow couldn’t manifest here if it caught a Uber ride to the front door.
But there’s the rainbow all the same.
I am staring at the flat panel above the bar tender.
“I use to live there,” I say.
He looks at me with a smile that says ‘who cares.’
“The end of the rainbow, you know.”
He wipes a glass and puts it in the rack over the bar.
He doesn’t care. He doesn’t get it.
The bartender is a rainbow-less soul who measures life by the pour, and 15% tips.
He will trudge through his life never knowing the colorful burst of life and pot of gold that exists just over the horizon of the next dream.
But I’ve been there. I know where it is.
Right now it’s on the GOLF channel. The rest of the weekend it will be plastered across the prism of sporting opulence.
From CBS to ESPN to local highlights, America will see the rainbow and wonder why they live where they live.
Why do I shovel snow where I live, they will ponder.
Why do I even own an ice scraper they will wonder as they stare at the sunlit treasure by the sea.
I’m wearing a leather jacket and a scarf. I look like I just got out of a crop duster flown by Amelia Earhart.
It’s 25 degrees outside this bar. The sidewalk is icy, stained with salt pellets.
People enter and a cold arctic belch pours in behind them.
I turn to the plasma for warmth.
I stare at the lush green course, the brilliant blue sky, the powerful sea accentuated by white caps.
I may be 2,500 miles away, but I can touch the rainbow with my memories. It’s burning brightly in a corner of my mind, a vision of spectacular wonder.
The memory is clear, like a candelabra on a Liberace Baby Grand Piano.
Where’s this rainbow you ask.
It’s at the end of the world.
Head West young man.
Go till you can go no further, and then lay a course for the Monterey Peninsula.
The Rainbow begins around Big Sur maneuvering up a pristine coast line to Carmel By the Sea.
Today the world gets to drool from their bar stools and couches in the frozen Tundra of America and see what few get to experience, thanks to the ATT at Pebble Beach.
The golf is good, but to me, it’s beside the point.
The beauty shots that accompany the play is what draws my attention like a seagull to a ham sandwich.
The Snoopy blimp floats over the course beaming beautiful vistas to the world.
Every few minutes, the cameras tilt up and find something so magnificent, it tends to overwhelm the announcers who simply stop talking about golf and begin drooling like a dog watching bar b que being chopped.
The mighty pacific is ferocious, undulating with white caps and energy. It is endless, timeless, surging from a point on the horizon where time doesn’t matter.
The sun is low in the western sky and the orange energy of light bathes the green course in a warm ethereal glow that fools recently departed souls into thinking they have found the pearly gates.
As the blimp hovers over a fog bank, and zooms slowly down upon the lone cypress standing proudly, defiantly on a rock against the mighty sea, my brain surges.
“Wow. I use to live there.”
But when I lived there, I didn’t appreciate it.
“Tourists Go Home!” I use to yell at couples walking down Ocean Avenue, decades ago.
“It’s the end of the rainbow,”my dad once told me.
I was 18 years old and packing for college.
I was sick of this tiny tourist trap. So small. So boring.
“I’m going to L.A.,” I said like a snarky 18-year-old who had all the wisdom of a gob of spit on a hot sidewalk.
My dad laughed.
“This is the end of the rainbow, son. This is what people are looking for in life. You are leaving the rainbow. You’ll realize that one day.”
The words didn’t mean too much to me then.
The words mean a lot more to me now.
It’s just like my dad said.
We are all looking for something in life.
Contentment, happiness.
X MARKS THE SPOT.
My dad calls it the end of the rainbow.
It starts with a magnificent zip code and ends where the cypress trees salute the setting sun.
I don’t care much for the golf at the ATT this weekend.
It’s not the Masters.
But it’s the tournament I crave for each year.
It reminds me of my youth, of my dad, of a time when I thought I knew everything, but really didn’t know a damn thing.
Life is about finding your rainbow.
Everyone’s rainbow is someplace.
For me, it always seems to end where the sea otters lay on their backs cracking open abalones laughing at the whales meandering just off Point Lobos.
Finding your rainbow.
Life’s Crazy™