Paul Meets George

In September 1954, 12 year-old Paul McCartney met 11 year-old George Harrison on a Liverpool bus. A Book of Ages is full of crossed paths and lucky meetings. John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono at a gallery opening when he was 26; Elvis meeting the Beatles when he was 30 (he didn't know their names and couldn't tell them apart). Elvis meeting President Nixon. Che Guevara meeting Castro, Gertrude Stein meeting Alice B. Toklas, Lillian Hellman meeting Dashiell Hammett, J. D. Salinger meeting Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain meeting Sigmund Freud, Freud meeting Jung, Freud meeting Salvador Dali, Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, T. S. Eliot meeting Groucho Marx, Charles Lindbergh meeting Hitler. Sylvia Plath meeting Ted Hughes at a party in Cambridge; she bit his cheek till it bled. Rodgers meeting Hammerstein, Astaire meeting Rogers, Rolls meeting Royce. When partners meet there is an electric spark. It can happen anywhere, at any age.

T. S. Eliot and Groucho have dinner

On June 3, 1964, T. S. Eliot sent a car to London’s Savoy Hotel to bring Mr. and Mrs. Groucho Marx to dinner. Eliot told Groucho that their friendship had greatly enhanced his credit with the grocer across the street. Eliot was 75, Groucho 73. Both were masters of the wisecrack, coiners of famous epigrams, now measuring out their lives in coffee spoons.

A Book of Ages is full of people meeting who you'd never thought met each other, or perhaps wondered if they had. Freud giving advice to Mahler, having his portrait drawn by Salvador Dali, Salinger meeting Hemingway in Paris, Marilyn Monroe having tea with Isak Dinesen at Carson McCullers's apartment, William F. Buckley Jr. meeting John Kenneth Galbraith for the first time in an elevator on the way to Truman Capote's Black & White Ball. Life is full of crossed paths. You never know who you might meet tomorrow.