"Dad, Is It Ever Discouraging?"

On work that has gone fallow, and being a small part of a large design

Children home from college for the summer is a beautifully strange thing, because when they first leave, when they pack up the car and drive off to this new life that doesn’t involve you, they become something new. It’s terrifying and necessary and intriguing, this parting of ways, this diminishing and shifting of roles.

I watched my cousins with their…