Dancing with Anna Livia

There are fourteen river Gods in Ireland, though, in typical Irish style, one of them is the God of the Atlantic Ocean. Of these Gods thirteen are hairy men and one is the epitome of female beauty, Anna Livia Plurabella.……. On that morning years ago, the morning of the crowded airport and the dawnings of time and life, when he first heard her voice, when he turned and first saw blue eyes that would become for him a constant beacon, Conor Finnegan recognized that the matrices of his narrow, focused existence had shifted. He knew this instinctively, the whisper of a soft and subtle voice telling him that his axis had just been displaced, slightly at first, but with an immense potential to whirl around in increasingly wider arcs. There had been no place else for her to sit, or so it seemed. She stood there balancing a travel bag, a briefcase and a Starbucks latte, frazzled, disjointed, and perhaps the most beautiful woman Conor’s eyes had ever found. It took an act of concentrated will just to be able to stammer out a response, “Please”, as he jolted to his feet, bumping the table as he pushed back his chair and sending a few drops of his own latte over the edge. Adrienne, her name was. Conor had never known an ‘Adrienne’, and the name itself burrowed into his delicate psyche with a lyricism that would never leave him. Later he would marvel at the prescience of her parents, who at her birth found for her a name that echoed the grace and elegance that every movement, every phrase seemed to carry. So then, on that faraway morning, this dance had begun. As time passed, Conor mused at the series of accidents, curiosities and whimsies that had created their space. What if the airport that day had not been so crowded? What if his plane had come in late, or hers? What if the man in line ahead of him had taken more time to make up his mind – latte or double espresso? – and Conor would have been standing in a queue instead of claiming the next-to-last of too few seats? What if she had looked at him then, and seen him for what he really was? But life’s elliptical journey is defined by the accidents that intertwine our destinies, and this was no different. Hadn’t Thomas Wolfe written that “Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.” It was love, indeed, and everything that went with it – the struggles of two arcing careers, where to be, what to do, how to live. Children and schools. The arguments, and then the gentle repairs. The worries and frets of money, and relationships, and that greatest of all concerns, the specter of time. Conor Finnegan sat now in a well appointed living room and gazed across at Adrienne, reading her book, a blanket tucked around legs drawn under her delicate form. Still thin and light after these years. Conor sipped his wine, then looked out the back window to the woods, shadowed now in a setting sun. The sun was in fact setting, for both of them. It had been twenty-five years since the flusters of an airport morning had thrown them together. Conor had not broken her, although he was sure that there were times when he had come close. He was, after all, who he was. Let the sun set, then, and let the tyranny of time sweep down the last of their years together. There was no sorrow in this, no sense of loss. Conor Finnegan had married Anna Livia, the most beautiful woman he could ever know. He looked to her again, as he always had, and the river of time flowed through them, and around them, more softly than he could ever have anticipated.