Some Matters of Gravity
Julie Davidson has taken up residence in the Canyon Creek elderly Care Center and reminisces on Ray and Lesa’s final days and tragic deaths that resulted in her raising Margie who is finishing her education in the northeast. Roger Bonn is retiring from major league baseball to a new home overlooking the reservoir that covers what was once the hamlet of Canyon Creek. Margie comes to visit Julie and Roger and Ellie at which time discussions arise concerning an additional Bonn family secret that is disconcerting to Roger in particular. Julie was extremely old at this time and dies shortly after her contributions to the discussion of family history.
Roger has finds himself drawn into the love of physics that he shared with his father but had abandoned decades earlier for a Major League Baseball career but he is making little progress following his father’s earlier suggestions. When Eddie Bonn dies and the family convenes for his funeral, Roger encounters Julie Thompson who had been his father’s acquaintance and Roger’s professor. It is gravitation that has drawn him into discussions with Julie after the funeral. He meets Maria Parino who is also a physics professor and shares his passion — both physically and in physics. But disaster strikes the Bonn family again. After a long period of despondency at the loss of his wife Ellie to a domestic terrorist attack, Maria reappears and they marry. Eventually disaster strikes again. Two family members die and two baby girls are born like twin phoenixes rising from a fire.
Roger is emotionally and intellectually sidelined. A joyless life does go on, one way or another. It always does, but with Roger’s love of physics having been thrown overboard. Eventually, after having righted her own ship with the help of a psychologist who became a friend, Maria and the friend work to get Roger’s righted too.
This heady endeavor is interwoven with a unique sibling rivalry, marital problems, romance, and a seemingly never ending sequence of tragic events that the Bonn family continues to suffer and overcome. Three generations of the Bonn family have lived with echoes of ‘déjà vu’ all over again’.