The Best Parts of Today: (In Which the Persimmon Achieves a Kind of Immortality)

This morning I went for a walk up the canyon with Jeanne. A large hawk came out of the trees with a sudden clamor, hovered close for a moment, then soared off. A cottonwood dropped yellow leaves in our path. From the top of the hill the ocean looked like a band of molten light. As we neared home, Pi jumped into a water trough to splash around and drink, then shook himself off exuberantly.

At Jeanne's house she showed me the Persian rugs she bought on e-bay and the tile cabinet she built into her kitchen wall, studded here and there with seashells. She lent me a book and gave me a persimmon. She says it is the kind of persimmon you eat like an apple, not the kind you make into a pudding. I haven't bitten into it yet. I think I need to take a picture of it first.

Later my daughter told me about yesterday's snowfall in Boston and I thought about the wonder of new snow and the wonder of having a daughter experiencing all that wonder. I mentioned this to Jacquie on the phone and she read me a quote by Anne Fadiman: "One reason we have children, I think, is to experience through them the miracle of the Attacus moth: to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant, and that the old joys can re-emerge, fresh and new and in a completely different form."

Dogs, too, help rouse what's dormant. I just took Terra out for her night-time walk...the air was brisk, and the stars were bright and clear.

It was a perfect moment I would have otherwise missed.