In truth, I was never keen to have children. Motherhood, after all, would have dampened my fevered ambitions, and kids, of course, would have ended my own lifelong childhood.
Then I met Ripkyn, age 14 — skinny, slouched, with shaggy dark hair and majestically broad eyebrows lurching above black horn-rimmed eyeglasses and teenage zits. Maybe it was his ferret mind ever on the hunt that snared me or that hungry heart of his that sponged up the world.
I first met Ripkyn at the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple where the nuns — being close to several family members — offered him an occasional second home. They had discerned in Ripkyn a keen spiritual hunger — one typically found in the elderly, not pubescent teenagers.
