“Man and Woman”

Excerpt from “Remembering Eternity”: “Behind Annie’s flower-stem delicacy and blossom face rose the rock wall named Keegan. His name may have implied fire and determination, but Keegan emanated the solidity of rock, the stability of a castle bulwark. Immediately upon meeting Annie and Keegan, Skylar recognized the perfect combination they represented: the fragile protected by the mighty; for, as hackneyed as it might sound to someone who did not know them, they represented near-perfect allegories of feminine tenderness and masculine strength. Annie was able to brighten the world around her with freesia freshness, with the apricot-scented, violet, orange, yellow, and blue, fine-carved flower of her womanliness, to stand exposed to that world, spritelike, natural as a deep-wood glade, perfuming it with her innocent joy, precisely because Keegan’s hard wall of rock stood massively behind her. Egalitarian political forces had already begun, in the ‘70s, to seek the blurring of the gender essences of man and woman, pretending that if the sexes wore similar clothing and identical long locks, refrained from shaving their body hair, worked in the same jobs, and had maritally neutral honorifics preceding their surnames, somehow, magically, three million years of hominid development and sexual differentiation might be erased. Watching the distinctly feminine Annie and the unequivocally masculine Keegan interact caused Skylar to imagine that he heard, rising up from the earth underneath them, a passionate shout of “Viva le difference!” Women and men differed like night and day, yin and yang, flower and shrub.”