We just got an email from the gentleman from Jacksonville, Florida. He wanted us to take a look at a bridge. He attached a photo to his message. ( Linked us to the picture. Built a kind of bridge. ) A photo of the new bridge, located between Paris and Barcelona. The bridge is the highest bridge in the world - 280 meters . It's 2..5 kilometers long. Terry wanted to know if we'd want to drive over this bridge. It was a rhetorical question.

He knows I don't like driving over some bridges. Long ones. High ones. It wasn't always that way. Tunnels have always bothered me. I remember the first time I drove south, through that tunnel on I-95 outside of Baltimore. That was 1967. Back then, bridges didn't bother me. Tunnels. That's another story.

In the John Cheever short story The Angel of the Bridge, Cheever wrote, " I felt that my terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed horror of what was becoming of the world...and it was at the highest point in the arc of the bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and the bitterness of my feelings about modern life. "

The Cheever character is rescued one day by a young woman ( The angel ) who drives him over the George Washington Bridge, a bridge that has terrified him for years.

" She sang me across the bridge, " Cheever wrote.

I plan to read more of John Cheever now that I've made that long passage, that bridge that connects one's 50s from one's 60s.

I crossed that bridge Wednesday. My wife Donna sang me across it. My mother sang me across it. My friend, the gentleman from the great state of Florida - I heard him singing his song today. That email. The link to the picture of the bridge between Paris and Barcelona. He's helping me cross the spans, too. And I thank him for that.