Univrs* (for Univers*)

When I was a young teenager, I had an older cousin whom I greatly admired. He would often introduce me to new ideas about Life, the Universe, and Everything, kind of "New Agey" ones, but this was well before that term had really been coined. I remember one Christmas he took me to his room and showed me a copy of the I Ching, then taught me how to divine my fortune by tossing little sticks or coins. Another time he twisted a strip of paper, just once, taped the ends of it together, and informed me: "This is the shape of the universe." My mystic-minded cousin has since passed away and is now part of the very thing whose shape he had once demonstrated to me so memorably. As the similarly formed wedding band pictured here was engraved to make clear: "And the two shall be one." This of course is a Christian sentiment, but the Buddhists believe we are all one with the universe. Or as one of them one time put it to a hot dog vendor (pizza chef, etc.): "Make me one with everything." There were 40 occurrences of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 513 in WorldCat.

(A Möbius strip employed as a gold wedding band, inscribed with a scripture quote [Gen. 2:24, quoted later in Eph. 5:31], 1983, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid