Chapter 22 Humming 1

• HOW GLAD I AM that she doesn't look like any of my three daughters. In the last years especially, in which I have pursued a meditation practice and the study of the great, elegant texts of Buddhism, often I have felt that time does not exist, or that all of it exists in this very moment, or that the space of a lifetime is no bigger than a drop of dew trembling on a petal of a flower, and as evanescent. Given this perspective, what can our relative ages matter?
• Still, if Jeanine were to remind me of one of my daughters, I'd be uncomfortable. After all, I do inhabit the time-limited world of conditions. One condition being my aging body, wracked these days with the storms of menopause. Another being the old shingle house in which Ralph and I live. Rotting at its foundation and threatening to slide down the steep lawn in back, still it sits with shabby charm in the Berkeley hills. The house speaks to some people of a gracious, leisurely decade when trees were more numerous than houses up on the hill; as my presence must awake in some people a nostalgia for the late forties, early fifties, when young people were supposedly more innocent and trusting in life than they are today. I am not, myself, interested in that time of my youth, or in the years of mothering that came after
• J am really only interested in this particular moment in the big shadowy bedroom with its view of the distant Golden Gate Bridge red above the shining water. In this quiet afternoon now and then I hear the cooing of the doves who live under the eaves. A soft gray sound, from somewhere far away, it enters my mind as I look at the black curls lying flat, like a baby lamb’s, wet with our sweat and a sweeter, thicker juice. Wisps of curl feather down her thighs a few inches, lie softly up against the undercurve of her belly. This bower of dark hair, thin enough that the skin is visible underneath, damp and warm, welcomes me. I lick each curl, moving to where the hair grows more thickly, the odor deepens. Odor of salty wetness that Opens caves in my mind, rich odor of deep-sea secrets, of sun-warmed olives, the sunshine transmuted to a thick golden liquid in which I lie suspended. Jeanine’s odor.