"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,"—that is all 
     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. -John Keats

We saw her as we rounded a corner in San Diego’s Sea Port Village, “Angelique, The Living Music Box,” a creation of a performance artist Zoe Tantrum, who is now ten or more years older and probably doesn’t do this art anymore . . .

but the evening we saw her was magic.

Karen and I were celebrating one of our honeymoons in our long marriage of now forty-two years, and we were staying at our favorite Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel on the San Diego Bay.

During a stroll through the little town of shops and restaurants beside the hotel, we encountered “Angelique” and we stopped, transfixed and mesmerized, like the small crowd of people around her . . . especially the little girls who all wanted to be her.

I once wrote Karen, who I call “my beautiful bride,”

“You have been my vision of beauty in this life, the treasured reason for my sight.”

I wrote this verse for Karen as part of a larger poem about us after we had watched together a movie entitled “Bright Star” about the romantic poet John Keats and his tragic one true love Fanny Brawne.

My verse is actually about our one day passing from this life to hereafter.

“Should I close your eyes, or you close mine, or we rise together by angels’ flight, you have been my vision of beauty in this world, the treasured reason for my sight.”

Like the poet and poetry and art and beauty . . . life, itself, is ephemeral.

Perhaps that’s the reason we LOVE it so.