sap
Other things that make me happy –
Sunday was a good day. Woke up early, dragged my best boy out of bed, drove Hedwig the wonder car to the bakery behind Liberty Cafe on Cortland, breakfasted on coffee and brioche. Drove to Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, wandered homesickly through the Eastern Australian garden, settled beside a duck pond and read. Jeremy had Dan Savage’s The Kid, I was reading Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin. Same thing really. Several squirrels came down to drink at the pond. The ducks socialized and grazed. Just before we left, a red-tailed hawk darted through the clearing, no more than ten feet away from us.
I was leaning against a tree that turned out to be exuding sap. It glued me to its bark for a while. Jeremy helped pick the globs of sticky amber off the back of my shirt. For the rest of the day, we both smelt deliciously like tea-tree oil.
I said to Jeremy: “Don’t you feel these are the last days? The calm before the storm?” “Of course,” he said. But the gardens were full of breeders, human and otherwise, and it’s not impossible that we looked longingly at other peoples’ chimpanzee cubs. “It’ll be a nice place to bring the sprog,” he said eventually. “My parents used to bring us places like this all the time.”
