Thunderbolts and Madness

There is a scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone, hiding out in Sicily after killing Sollozzo at Louis' Italian American restaurant, first sees his future wife. He is overcome. The guys with him start to give him a hard time, telling him that he has been struck by the thunderbolt. The thunderbolt hits when a man is struck dumb and weak in the knees at the sight of a woman.

Over Thanksgiving this year, I was struck by the thunderbolt. It had been over three weeks since I had seen my wife. This was the longest separation in our marriage. She came home for the holiday from serving our country and our new president. She walked in the house and the family rushed to the front door to greet her. When I saw her, I went weak in the knees and felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I could not believe how incredibly beautiful she was. Strangely, I was also hit by regret and longing. It was the longing you feel when you look at an incredibly blue sky or perfectly still lake and want that moment to last forever, to embrace and own and devour it so that you can keep it and recall it whenever you want so that this intense feeling is yours to control. But you can't.

One of the lines from A Winter's Tale that has always stuck with me is that "To be mad is to feel with sadness and joy the intensity of a time which has already been or has not yet arrived." I looked at my wife, was struck by the thunderbolt, and felt I must be mad, lost in emotions and feelings and thoughts I had not experienced in over twenty years.

Maybe these are the feelings I felt when I was in Detroit in 1985 and saw her for the first time. Too much time has passed for me to remember. I hope they are - but if they are, they must mean I am losing my mind. Feeling with intensity a time which has already been. Lost in the feelings of the past and feeling them with intensity now, hoping now as an older man that I can bring these feelings back at will, but also knowing they come at unexpected unplanned moments over which I have no control. Happy to have felt them again, so painful, so exquisite, so unbidden, so intense. And fleeting, uncontrollable. Madness.