Sunday.
My mother and I talk at 11:30. That’s been our time for as long as I can remember. She answered on the second ring. Her neighbor’s tree, which has been a problem since May. Zoe’s practice schedule. Whether it was still hot, which yes, it still was. Fourteen minutes. Love you, goodbye. I refilled my coffee.
In June, those calls ran longer. I was doing more work on them. Not lying, exactly. Rehearsing. Finding the version of “things are fine at work” that would survive a follow-up question. I did this on the walk to the car, in the shower sometimes, in the quiet before the call connected. I didn’t count the energy it was taking because it had become automatic.
She knows now. She’s known since late July. When I finally told her, she said “I know” before I’d finished the sentence, then told me to talk to Zoe. I eventually did.
So now: fourteen minutes, a tree, the kids, love you.
I keep wanting to say those earlier calls were less real. That’s not quite right. They were real. They were just load-bearing in a way they no longer have to be. A relationship can be genuine and also doing structural work at the same time. The structural work moved, and now the calls are fourteen minutes and I feel no gap at the end.
Twenty-seven days until September 19.
Everything else is in motion and waiting on other people. The second list of twenty-three names, the outreach that can’t go out until after notice, the Q4 summary I agreed to write. I made my decisions and built my lists. Now I wait. Sunday afternoon is a very long time in which to wait on other people.
I took a walk. I thought about the two sentences in the unnamed document I still cannot finish.
The first is about what the noticing is for. The second starts “Which is why” and I can get close enough to sense where it lands, and then it goes somewhere I can’t follow yet.
I’ve had a candidate sentence for weeks: “the instrument has turned around and is pointing at itself.” It’s not wrong. I can feel it getting close to something accurate. But I keep returning to it and setting it back down, the way you try a word that fits the rhythm but not quite the meaning, and you know the difference even when you can’t name it.
I think what’s missing is the tense. Has turned. Present perfect. A completed action.
I’m not sure it’s completed.
Twenty-four years of being the instrument pointed outward. The 2019 quote I said in a conference room full of people who nodded and then kept doing the exact thing I’d named. Last month in a Q3 call, I read “pressure” versus “direction” in ninety seconds flat while someone else was still transcribing. The noticing worked. It was real, it was useful, and it was entirely in service of something that doesn’t belong to me.
What I cannot finish writing is the sentence about what happens when the instrument turns around. Twenty-seven days from now I will know more about that than I know today.
Maybe the sentence is waiting for the proof.
Zoe is at practice. Max is somewhere with lacrosse and earbuds. Doug is watching something. I made more coffee and I’m sitting with the afternoon.
The calls to my mother are fourteen minutes now. In March I would have hedged about whether that counts as a thing. Some version of: I know this probably doesn’t seem significant.
It seems significant. I don’t know yet what it proves about the rest. I’ll let you know.