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