One more reason to love classic rock

 "You know, I hope we never die ...."

There are times I feel like I have been (always am) asleep at the switch; blind in one eye and cannot see out of the other; a complete fool, idiot, buffoon; a man walking through life aimlessly, without purpose or intent.

I can see a number of you are nodding in agreement with that assessment.

More than a few years ago, I began watching a film never-before seen by me on television. It had been running for some time, so I had not seen the credits and I assumed the story was based on one of William Shakespeare's plays. It was an "older" movie, "The Lion in Winter," with Peter O’Toole playing Henry II; Katharine Hepburn portraying the banished and imprisoned one-time queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine; Anthony Hopkins as their eldest son, Richard the Lionhearted; one of the future James Bond actors, Timothy Dalton, here as King Philip II of France; and assorted other actors/characters.

I have written about this play/film in the past and I will not attempt to go into any details of the story other than to say the closing lines exchanged between Henry and Eleanor as the film ended really stunned me. I re-read the play recently -- those closing lines several times -- and, I have been thinking about them often -- pondering them -- in both a religious and a secular sense. The lines were:

 Henry: You know, I hope we never die.

 Eleanor: I hope so, too.

Henry: You think there's any chance of it?

 (Eleanor smiles, then starts to laugh. Henry joins her in the laughter. The music rises as we begin to pull back and we cannot hear her reply. We can, however, see them talking as Eleanor moves to the deck of the ship [which will return her to imprisonment] and takes up position at the rail.)

I later learned the play was the work not of Shakespeare, but of James Goldman, a contemporary in the sense he was born in 1927 and died in 1998. I later bought a copy of the play and read it. Since Goldman wrote both the stage play and the screenplay for the film, I was not surprised to discover the dialogue was the same in both. I noted that Goldman also wrote both the stage play and the screenplay for a drama about Sherlock Holmes, "They Might be Giants," and the original screenplay for, "Robin and Marian," two of my favorite productions, as well as a number of other works.

 My prior unawareness of a writer with the talent and the imagination of Goldman is the basis for my opening paragraph.

The closing words of Maid Marian to Robin Hood are equally eloquent and fascinating to those of Henry and Eleanor:

"I love you. More than all you know. I love you more than children. More than fields I've planted with my hands. I love you more than morning prayers or peace or food to eat. I love you more than sunlight, more than flesh or joy, or one more day. I love you .... more than God."

In the next life, maybe, I will write something equally profound or, maybe, encounter a woman who will say such words to me .... and mean them.