The bike shorts didn’t fit. Don’t ask why.

I put them in the “when I’m thin” pile. Then I saw the rainbow dividing the eastern sky.

I went to the garage, hit the door opener and the cool afternoon breeze blew away the dank, oily, grimy odors from all the stuff that we would never put indoors.

Before me was an old Dahon fat tire two wheeler, my second folding bike. The first I got as a birthday present. A few months later it was stolen after I locked it to streetlamp in front of the Delancey Street Playhouse in Philadelphia’s posh Rittenhouse Square. I had ridden several miles from my safe, suburban house down through scary slums and nasty, broken streets so I could rehearse my minor role in a community theater production in which my 13-year-old son was co-starring.

Later that year he would go to New York City to audition. Then he would become an equity actor in a revival of a Neil Simon play that would rehearse and open in south Florida, playing Cocoanut Grove and Fort Lauderdale before returning for six weeks at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater.

I would accompany him to New York and Florida and feel so proud when he took his bows at the end of every performance.

Then I would buy another identical Dahon folding bike that, a decade and a half later, looks just about the same, while its owner has thickened somewhat from the chest downward, had two heart attacks and gave up riding.

But strange things happen when you see a rainbow. You can feel like ancient people, who presumed that anything so beautiful must be special and divine–a gift, a signal, a sign.

I wore creased LL Bean full-lenth khaki trousers with one-inch cuffs, clunky black Merrill leather mocs, and a favorite blue-striped T-shirt.

The tires had enough air. I eased the bike out of the garage. The rear wheel’s snick-snick accused me of neglect.

I threw a leg over the bar, sat down, pressed on the pedal and took off.

My face divided the thick, late evening air. I hit the street that would normally be cluttered with rush hour parents returning from wherever they hunted and gathered, zoomed past the masked folks with their masked kids and unmasked dogs, heard the steady drone of fat tires on asphalt wet from the earlier cloudburst and returned to that moment from my childhood when we took the training wheels off my first two wheeler and I entered the transcendent state of speed.

I did the course I previously trudged in running shoes, with earphones and an ancient I-Pod. I glided up inclines that had seemed so signifcant as if they were mere variations in a path that was mine alone to enjoy.

I caught the scent of spring blossoms as my street came up. I was not sweating. I was not tired. I did not feel like a heart attack survivor, or a survivor of anything. I was just a guy on a bike having a great time being alive.

I asked myself if I should maintain my state of speed and prolong the ecstasy. Aging wisdom kicked in: don’t push yourself; it’s better to quit when you want more.

I rolled up the driveway and entered a garage that was no longer a dungeon for outdoor stuff.  It was a Bat Cave and I was Bat Man having returning to a world of an invisible, infinitesimal killer, in which people are suffering and dying and sacrificing everything they have to save lives.

But a world with enough rainbows for everyone, when we need them.