the secret of life

Turning 62 has been fun. Take for example dinner at The Eagle in Cambridge where I had baked salmon on a bed of cous cous with a small green salad and two glasses of house merlot. By chance we sat at the table where Crick and Watson announced their DNA findings to the world. I say "by chance" because this was pointed out to us by a slim arcane creature in a sea blue shoulder to ankle outfit and finger-tipped magenta running from her hairline down her forehead. Was she really blonde? Does it matter? We established from across the room she wouldn't mind our joining her at the four top just vacated by six or was it twelve twenty-somethings.

"I only want a little bit of the table," she said. As we gathered our jackets and hats and daypacks to our newfound corner in the ancient, low-beamed and extremely busy pub, she said, "Are you geneticists?"

"What did you say?" I said.

"Are you geneticists?"

"Why do you ask? Something about our body language?"

She turned to look at the wall behind me and said, "This is where the geneticists always sit."

I followed her sightline and read:

The Eagle, Cambridge
Discovery of DNA

On this spot, in February 28, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson made the first public announcement of the discovery of DNA with the words "We have discovered the secret of life..."

Oh my gosh. Good Lord. Or words to that effect, said I.

Meanwhile our dining neighbor poured forth on a series of topics from Isaac Newton, whom she was currently studying, to John Dee the Elizabethan whose extraordinary library is reckoned to have fed Shakespeare's wellsprings of creativity. The South Bank's Globe Theatre came up. They really should provide the whole Elizabethan experience, she said, wooden platters and Elizabethan fare. Like wild boar? I said. She laughed and said she was vegan, that wouldn't do. And serve the meals in Elizabethan costume, she said. Somehow God slipped in before we even had a chance to order our food, particulary the thought that God is really comprised of the entirety of human consciousness, a though I shared. She was a painter, one who was becoming jolly tired of stretching her own canvas, one who is currently reading a book on the saints besides the three works on Newton, who dislike unpleasantries, avoided them like the plague, which happily, I wanted to add, he also avoided.

I was well into my salmon by the time she left, putting her Isaac Newton Institute coffee mug in a plastic bag before secreting it in the voluminous folds of her cloth bag. She did manage to say she was quite fond of St Joseph of... who lived on air. I turned again to the plaque fixed up there over my left shoulder, this time reading the last sentence:

"Throughout their early partnership Watson and Crick dined in this room on six days every week."

Six days a week!

My mother once told me, Fly with the eagles, my son, but this put a whole new spin on her advice.

Have lunch in The Eagle every day of the week but one!

On the way back to my friends' house, I squeezed my rental between tight parallel lines of cars, made right hand turns by turning left on roundabouts, gave way to a double-decker bus coming head-on at us over a one-lane traffic "calming" speed bump, and I thought about the complexities of Cambridge, where one takes long, deviating detours around stretches of ancient buildings in a law-abiding negotiation of ornate one-way systems...I thought, Oh my gosh. Good Lord. Or words to that affect. No wonder Crick and Watson came up with the secret of life in spirals of DNA. They had to GET to The Eagle. And like all our mothers have told us, it's the journey itself that really counts, but I can't help thinking it must really help when there's a glass of house merlot waiting at the other end.

But it's more complicated than that. We sat across from each other, my old friend and I, having first met at a theatre called The New London on Drury Lane. He worked the flying system and I pushed scenery about down below. Several years later, he worked the Lyttleton and I worked the Olivier at the National Theatre on the South Bank. Then, as I embarked on my life as father of a family, and all my theatre mates faded from view, he rescued me with a job at The Comedy just off Leicester Square. I say all this because our lives have spiraled around each other, with long arcs of time and space separating our different realities, but we always seem to intersect, like that night at The Eagle, when we raised our glasses to The Journey and gave thanks for our parallel lives that sometimes bring us together.