Sunday, the grown sons out at their own lives, and I've got the table and a spare hour, which is the only time this ever gets written.
This week I built the thing that's meant to do it without me. Put it on a machine that isn't mine, so it runs whether I'm at the desk or not, whether I show up on a Sunday or don't. A failsafe against my own silence. Two days making sure it would work when I wasn't there, plus a stiff neck I'm still carrying around (apparently my neck got the memo about my age before I did).
On the news that evening a man explained that whole departments run on a headcount of nearly none now, and the presenter moved on to the weather. So did I.
Then I couldn't leave it alone. I ran it to watch it run. Read what it would say in my place, in my voice. I changed a line, because the line wasn't how I'd have put it. I built it so it could put things without me, and there I was, fixing its commas. I stood over it like a man watching a kettle he's already decided to trust.
Upstairs the Mrs. had been on the phone with her sister for an hour; I could hear her laughing through the ceiling. Then she came down for a glass of water, looked at the screen, looked at me, and went back up. She's seen that face before.
Anyway, I've done this my whole life. Build it to run without me, then can't decide whether I want it to. Either I hover and it never leaves my hands, or I do the other thing - let go, turn my back, rest - and the last time I did that, ten years of work died while I was resting.
Somewhere there is a version of this that goes out clean on a Sunday I never came to, and nobody, not even her, could tell it wasn't me. That is the thing I built. It is also the thing I keep reaching over to touch. I wanted to make something that would outlast my attention. I didn't think about how it would feel to stand here and watch it not need me. That one doesn't go away when I close the laptop.
The house is quiet. The machine says it's ready. I keep finding reasons to check. One more run. Probably.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
— Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb," The Wall, 1979