The light bulb in my bedroom could have lit a truckstop. As my Dad walked down the hall he would pause, "Time to get up", then turn it on and keep walking. I would writhe, seeing the veins within my eyelids. Whatever I had been dreaming would skitter off to the closet, making a mess of it. Duck Hunting. We had to be there before dawn.

We hunted on a pond in the middle of 40 acres. The pond was a wide spot, where the incline of the surrounding acreage sent rainwater to gather. Mallards loved it.

We would walk to the pond in the dark, sometimes stopping to listen for ducks. We then crouched, and before long we were on our hands and knees. As we got closer, we crawled on our bellies.
One day, like many days, there were no ducks on the pond. There was a high ceiling of clouds and up at their edge, great, determined lines of geese made their way south. No one was stopping.

Behind us, over the Sierras, sunrise was coming. There was a gap, where the bottom of the clouds and top of the mountains allowed daylight through. When the sun began to fill that gap, something wonderful happened.

With our backs to the sunrise, the pond in front of us lit up. It was as though every plant, every duck decoy, all the water, had been turned to gold. The dark grey clouds in front of us became the background for a rainbow. It went from one end of the pond and landed on the other, demonstrating every color, and every subtlety of every color between them. While the sun filled and then rose past that tiny gap, the rainbow lived.

My Dad broke the silence. "Don't forget this". Then it was gone. After that the morning was gray, just gray. The ducks weren't coming. We waited a while then went home.

We have talked about that day for many years, it is one of my Dad's favorite stories of my upbringing. I remember every bit of it, but mostly I remember how things went very bad for me after that. My mental illness would get the best of me. We talked about that day for many years, it is one of my Dad's favorite stories. If I had known the the path my life would take, at the end of that moment I'd have put the shotgun under my chin, and blown my head off.