November 6, 2011
Two recent stories of love and death feel connected. This is absurd considering that 1,500 years and 5,000 miles separate them. But why let facts get in the way of a feeling, a yearning? Last month an Iowa couple married for 72 years died an hour apart while holding hands. The wife died first but the hospital heart-rate monitor kept showing she had a pulse. The equipment was detecting her husband’s heart through their clasped hands. Then came news last week of an archeological find in Italy: two skeletons buried in the 5th or 6th centuries while holding hands. How can there be a connection beyond hands held and the bond of enduring love they signify?
The stories reminded me of a column, “Einstein’s God” that suggests the possibility of something I want to believe: the two couples are one in the same. When Albert Einstein learned of the death of a physicist friend, he wrote to the friend’s family:
He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.â€
“Table 25 is a table of two…” So begins a restaurant owner’s account of a most romantic Portland spot. Not because of the setting at Andina’s but what Mama Doris calls magic at work. She describes celebrations of love playing out at the table, events sometimes so intense that they rivet the staff.
Maybe her story connects with me because another table for two, this one at a small restaurant in Winter Park, Florida, proved pivotal in my love life years ago. Funny that I remember nothing about the food but can still picture everything about the table and the bewitching woman sitting across from me.
Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?
That, Thornton Wilder said, was the underlying question of his acclaimed 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book explores the lives of five people who fall to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru collapses.
I don’t think about the book when I cross Portland’s river bridges. But I do when I pass one block of Northeast 33rd Avenue. Several years ago I spotted two wooden bridges spanning small yards on opposite sides of the street.
No one will die if these bridges break, but I immediately linked them with Wilder’s work, which won a Pulitzer Prize. They’ve nagged at me ever since, something more than curiosities. But what? Read More
