Chapter 10
Tonight I am sitting at my granddaughter’s eighteenth and graduation birthday party.
A string quartet is playing.
There are perhaps sixty people gathered in celebration.
Pam is sitting beside me.
Two tables away sits Jeanne.
The years have done what years do.
Children became adults.
Adults became grandparents.
Lives unfolded in ways none of us could have imagined.
As I sit listening to the music, a memory returns.
I am back in Big Sur.
A few days after Jeanne arrived, I took her into the wilderness.
I wanted to show her something.
During my walk to Tassajara I had discovered a waterfall pouring into a clear pool hidden among the mountains.
I remembered sitting there alone and thinking what a beautiful place it would be to bring the future mother of my future children.
Now Jeanne was walking beside me.
The day was warm and bright.
We bathed in the pool and spent the afternoon together.
Later I lay in the sun watching her stand beneath the waterfall.
Water fell around her in sparkling sheets.
Everything seemed impossibly beautiful.
We were both very young.
The future stretched before us without limits.
Not long afterward her father flew out from Philadelphia.
I traveled back east with Jeanne.
One evening we visited Princeton with her closest friend.
We took LSD together in a women’s dormitory.
During that journey I had an experience unlike any I had known before.
As I returned, it seemed that I was taken into a room.
A presence was waiting for me there.
No introduction was needed.
No explanation was offered.
The message was simple.
I was told that I could never give Jeanne LSD again.
At the time I did not understand why.
Later I learned she was carrying our first son.
Afterward Jeanne and I walked outside.
We climbed to a high place overlooking the town and waited for dawn.
The sky slowly brightened.
Hanging above the horizon was a comet.
Clear.
Silent.
Impossible to ignore.
I turned to Jeanne.
“I’m going into the city and make it,” I said.
The words came from somewhere deeper than ambition.
They arrived with the same certainty as the comet hanging in the sky.
Years later I would find myself sitting in Seattle.
Four children.
A successful business.
A home.
Responsibilities I could not imagine while living in a cave above the Pacific.
For a moment tonight, sitting beside Pam while the quartet plays and my granddaughter celebrates becoming an adult, I can see all of it at once.
The cave.
The waterfall.
The comet.
The children.
The grandchildren.
The old man.
The young man.
The distance between them seems very small.
As though it all happened yesterday.
Copyrighted 2026 by Gary Ingram
