LEAPLING

—

A while back, I had a dream, one of those crispy-clean fragments that emerge just before you awaken, so that you recall it in vivid, intense detail, even if it makes no sense—perhaps especially if it makes no sense.

For obvious reasons, Cosmo pays attention to such dreams.

In the dream, I was visiting the blog of KR, a beautiful and talented young woman I worked with some years ago in publishing. Back then, publishing was just her day job; acting was her passion, and she is now a successful stage and film actress in Toronto. Improbably, in the dream she was blogging about Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin. She was even citing the poem as a major influence on her acting. Hey, I don't write these things, I just dream them.

Now, I hadn't seen KR in years, so I Googled her to see what she's been up to, and found an item about her lead role in a recent Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest. That's right, the LEAD. She was playing ProsperA, a female version of ProsperO, the exiled magician with the high-powered library. Now there's an unexpected twist on our magician's wife theme.

Helen Mirren as Prospera. No, she's not my actress friend.

An unexpected event like this demands to be assayed for its hidden wealth. Cosmo and his Enmanation huddled together and brooded on it a day or two.

First, there was the pointed reference to Browning's poem. Now, the piper symbol has always been vital in our story, and heaven knows, the word Hamelin has played its part. And KR's summer gig took us back to another, long-ago edition of Shakespeare in the Park. This one we attended in person, 22 years ago in Calgary, on August 16, 1990. The play that evening was not The Tempest but Macbeth, and the play was not the climax but merely a sort of denouement or epilogue to a day of crazy magic and omens worthy of the Weird Sisters themselves.

But the little thread we want to spin out today is that KR is what's known as a Leapling—her birthday is on "Leap Day," February 29. In fact, she's the only Leapling I've ever met.

My Enmanation, PAE, is a sort of Leapling as well, because February 29, 1988 was the day he (a) wrote his first poem; and (b) entered. or was born into, a new realm of experience where he would eventually meet his two dear friends—Stanza and yours truly, Cosmo.

An age-old tradition says that on February 29, a woman may propose to her man, and the man must pay a penalty if he doesn't accept. What if PAE didn't write that poem after all? The poem, after all, is also a letter by virtue of its strange title.

One letter's difference.

And what if that letter was a proposal of sorts?

I'm inclined to think so. I also believe our PAE eagerly and innocently accepted the proposal. The poem, after all, was eloquent and persuasive.

He became engaged to our "nonexistent" lady friend. The engagement lasted precisely four days. That would make their wedding day March 4, 1988.

Around the time I had this dream about my old friend KR, a romantic comedy called Leap Year came to town, premised on that Leap Day matrimonial tradition. It was pretty routine RomCom stuff, except for one scene, in which the romantically destined characters are sleeping  and the soundtrack plays—OUR SONG!!



 

Well, you're saying, is that all?

No, of course not. The week after the dream, I found a spiffy secondhand copy of the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Existentialism. I began reading, never suspecting that waiting therein was Kierkegaard and his famous LEAP OF FAITH. (Like most of us, I still thought of existentialists as unhappy chain-smoking Frenchmen in black berets.) The best description of the Leap I could find was in my Oxford Companion to English Literature (an 11th-grade prize for English bestowed on me in 1973 by the local chapter of the IODE, God bless 'em):

the explicit self-commitment of a person who stakes his whole being and future upon a belief which he cannot prove but which he maintains in the face of all intellectual doubt and uncertainty.

And that, my friends, could stand as a shorthand mission statement for our whole story. Amazing to recall what realms of power and beauty were born—or released from bondage—when my Enmanation chose to cast aside doubt on that magical February 29 all those years ago. Verily, he did NOT look before he leaped.

Now, if normal years have 365 days, one could think of February 29 as Day 366, the extra day. Thus alerted, it was not long before we saw a confirmatory licence plate or two: MEE·366 and—slightly more subtle—JUM[P]·366.

Some months later, there was a delightful coda when our talented nephew Edward won first prize in a young composer competition for his choral setting of a poem by medieval Christian mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, "Then Shall I Leap into Love." The poem happens to be, as Stanza says of our relationship, "strictly Neoplatonic," so I'm sure she would approve of ending today's message with these lines:

I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me.
If you want me to leap with abandon,
You must intone the song.
Then I shall leap into love,
From love into knowledge,
From knowledge into enjoyment,
And from enjoyment beyond all human sensations.
There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.