I remember a talk called The Thoughts of Many Hearts by my Uncle Don Rose, the one who finished life on earth with bionic knees. It was thirty years ago., and he told a story about a couple who found each other, as if by fate.

"She saw the young man, and said in her heart, 'He is mine.' The young man saw her for the first time and said in his heart, 'She is mine.' " It was romantic, the stuff of movies and love songs.

We were still on the new end of marriage and had not yet perfected the means to be truly awful to each other. In my innocence I felt the magic of his words stir within me. We were in the throes of raising two small children, but it was true. John was mine, and I was his. We belonged.

"That meeting was beautiful. It was a beginning. Yet there is something going on in this very room that is even more marvelous. There are people who, after forty or fifty years, are still saying it.

"He is mine."

That moment was branded on my heart. I can still remember where I was sitting, and the tilt of his head. Even the dress I was wearing. I can hear his words soften to almost a whisper. I was not savvy enough to turn and look around me, to soak up the image of couples in the sunset of their lives. No doubt there were many that day, hand in wrinkled hand, smiling at each other as they sighed at the shared assurance. Perhaps some octogenarian mouthed the words to his wife of half a century.

"You are mine."