Point of View: Mariolatry

I’ve seen my wife worshipful, utterly transported, a few times in my life. Once in the cathedral at Chartres, and now, many years later, again, at the Baltimore Aquarium, where, beckoned by her hands, which she’d pressed against the glass, a dolphin gliding by faced around and came ever so slowly toward her, smiling, her eyes seeming to say, “I know you.”

While I read much about life and how to live it and how to explain it and how others have lived it (as for mine, it’s been examined and examined and examined), I’ve always known she senses truths so much more naturally than I, a being still bound up in words. Communicating with another species — I do not quite qualify, she has said — is a great joy to her. Yes, and a beauty forever. She and a lioness connected in a similar way at the Highland Park Zoo in Pittsburgh once, though, because of the interposition of a waddling mother with swaddled child, their moment was brief. Mary remembers the lioness, with half-closed eyelids (as were hers), searching around them for her.

“And what else did you like about the aquarium?” she asked me.

I answered: The razorbills’ mad dashes and flips on and around and under the water (mating maneuvers such as we’d never seen before! “I wish I had that energy,” a woman near me said) and the rescued 550-pound sea turtle with one flipper that had been sent down to Baltimore from Riverhead. It was as if — no, not as if — the male razorbill were saying, “Look at me, look at me!” as he flipped this way and that, furiously flapping his feathers before diving precipitously into the water and popping up in front of her. And as if the female, who continually outmaneuvered the poor fellow, speeding over the water like a Jet Ski, and then turning on a dime in front of him as he desperately tried to keep up, were saying, “Catch me if you can!”

“They’re mating, aren’t they?” I asked the guide who was sitting near the sub-Arctic birds exhibit.

“Things get a little frisky around this time of year,” he said. “They have quite the urge.”

“Well, don’t we all?” said Mary, whom I adore whether we’re in or far from Baltimore.