LITMIR.BIZ

       DAPHNE

      In autumn the scoters and coots are joined by canvasback, golden eye, bufflehead, merganser, and pintail. Day by day the sun sets further and further south and sinks behind the Golden Gate. And on one late afternoon when the heavy clouds were drifting away, Daphne could see it floating between the pylons of the bridge, a red balloon dropping in a cradle. During the rain that day she ate her lunch in a relay box, stuffing peanut butter and jam in her cheeks like a child in fruit-crate. But at the end of her route the rain had stopped and she studied the sky and its shifting light, gray, then gold as scud clouds gibed with the sun. Wet wine-red leaves of the plum trees and leaves of the liquid amber, cerise and yellow, decorated the sidewalks like mosaic. So many trees, elm, Chinese Elm, buckeye, cedar, incense cedar, redwood, camphor, ginkgo, bay, banya-banya, juniper, palm … there were more different trees in Berkeley than there were people. Often she couldn’t see the difference between freak, straight, poor and not so poor black, who were always changing as the city itself changed from the Free Speech Movement to communes to ashrams to people living alone again as they did before the war. She had come here a girl eager for college and found herself six years later eating peanut-butter and jam in a mail-box. She was tired, her bag full of letters marked NO LONG ER AT THIS ADDRESS. Berkeley had become a flyway to her migratory generation. She hopped in her little three-wheel scooter and zipped down the hill to Telegraph Avenue. At twenty-four, in gray sweater and skirt, she felt old and wise, and for old time’s sake stopped in the Mediterranean Cafe to sit by the window and watch the people go by. “Tell me about FSM,”