Upon meeting Mary Jo, 93 years old

She sits wrapped in soft folds of pink, a woolen shawl falling off one shoulder. A flash of white lace grazes her knees as she crosses and uncrosses her legs. She is radiant in the golden glow of the lamps encircling the room, and even the tea and cookies startle with their uncommon taste.

We embark on a journey.

It took us thirteen billion years to get here, you and me, looking at each other on this very evening. (A leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of stars)

She ponders whether it might not have been interesting to have been a scientist after all had she had her life to live over. A cosmologist? A geneticist? DNA – that’s one of the things we are given, as we are given our birthplace, our epoch, our parents. Then there are the things we choose – and not just the big decisions, but the untold afterthoughts that turn out to have had the impress of God’s finger weaving the red thread on the tapestry of life. This thread is ending, but she is not sad.

It doesn’t matter. The point is that I won’t be here to regret that fact. (Before birth, after death – they are exactly the same in this way: there will be no memory and there will be no desire)

She cannot read her books anymore, but that hardly matters. Like very old friends, they have revealed themselves beyond words. Now she knows that the spirit dwells in the human voice, in the music of the storytelling, in the pause between thoughts. She had made a pact with herself long ago.

I will never turn away from any thought or memory. (The arrogance and the meanness, the inflicted injuries, must all be companions to love)

To love every moment with consummate awareness: that is to live in eternity. Carefully now: trace the delicate imprint of fossilized bones in the soft limestone with your finger. That is Osteolepis panderi, meeting its own fingertip across four hundred million years in an instant.

The evening draws to a close and I stagger out into the night. The fog has lifted, and thousands of city lights drape over the hillsides and valleys below. Each one is a beacon on this tiny dust mote trailing along the outer fringes of a minor galaxy, hurtling into the inscrutable unknown.