Brown

"I’m in my mother’s arms but somehow the chair is not on the floor, it’s up in the air suspended in the voids of sawdust smelling mist blowing from Lajoie’s wood yard, suspended over yard of grass at corner of West Sixth and Boisvert – that daguerreotype gray is all over, but my mother’s robe sends auras of warm brown (the brown of my family) – so now when I bundle my chin in a warm scarf in a wet gale – I think on that comfort in the brown bathrobe – or as when a kitchen door is opened to winter allowing fresh ices of air to interfere with the warm billowy curtain of fragrant heat of cooking stove ... say a vanilla pudding ... I am the pudding, winter is the gray mist. A shudder of joy ran through me – when I read of Proust’s teacup – all those saucers in a crumb – all of History by thumb – all of a city in a tasty crumb – I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove. It’s exactly like cold milk on hot bread pudding, the melting of hot and cold is a hollow hole between memories of childhood."

Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Page 19.