Then I opened my statistics homework — the course uses more statistics than I expected, which my old professor would probably find poetic — and worked for an hour before bed.
My apartment is quiet on Tuesday evenings. The overhead light works, now. The lamp is on anyway because I prefer it.
I have a data analysis course and a position I’m watching and twenty-five thousand and something dollars in savings that are mine.
I have a brother who asks how things are and listens when I answer.
I have parents who are, slowly and imperfectly, telling a more accurate story.
I have Sophie, and the Côtes du Rhône memory, and ten years of shared bus-schedule complaint.
I have a list of things I want. Not a dramatic list. A practical one.
I am thirty-two years old.
The list is just beginning.
Between the Dinner and the Conversation
There were three weeks between the Sunday dinner and the family meeting, and I want to account for them because they were not a period of dramatic preparation. They were mostly a period of ordinary life with a large thing sitting in the corner of it.
I went to work. I managed the operational schedule for a clinic that sees approximately two hundred and forty patients a week. I did the kind of work that I do well — coordinating staff coverage, reviewing patient flow data, handling the particular friction that occurs when the front desk system and the billing system have incompatible definitions of “appointment status.” This is specific, useful, unromantic work, and I find it satisfying in the way that competence at something specific is satisfying.