Daffy Yum Page 163

Sissy meets The Chink! He looked like "the little man with the big answers." And he took her to the clockworks. God I loved the clockworks when I first read about it. It was so much like the way life marks time. It made me decide that I was a Zen Taoist--someone who loved the flow but with a few surprises thrown in--the mellowness of meaning and the flashes of enlightenment.

I once had a desert tortoise and I'd let it roam free while I was working in the garden. And no matter how much I tried to keep my eye on him, he found some way to burrow under something and hide. Then I'd spend twenty minutes looking for him. I even wrote a haiku about that turtle:

Now you see him
Now you see him
Now you see him
Now you don't.

The Chink was as steady and as elusive at that tortoise (which happened to have a wild hair or two.)