Three minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

Steering around parked cars and oncoming traffic, the inventory continues: I compare shingles and shutters and lawns and fences to our disintegrating ones. That morning I’m especially tweaked by an ever-expanding three-story addition going up in the back of an already massive turreted single-family Victorian. I brake and lift my sunglasses in an exaggerated slow-motion drive-by of shock and awe, watching the workmen come in and out of their parked trucks with windows and casings and boxes of tiles and long planks of lumber. So much wood; so many trees sacrificed for state-of-the-art kitchens and mudrooms and laundry rooms and separate marital snoring rooms. If we weren’t so late already, I would probably lean out the window and take a photo, then post it with a snarky caption on one or all of my social media accounts. I’m sure that the people moving in, whoever they are, still sleep in the same room, in the same bed; still earn livings and have savings; still plan for the future the way normal people do, though I know that my childish presumptions could be wrong: you never know what peoples’ lives are really like.

Two minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

I force myself to stop the inventory and focus instead on our destination: I tell myself that it’s just middle school, just seventh grade, taught by a leftover hippie dude full of childlike wonder who spends too much time sculpting his facial hair. But it’s the day I’m scheduled to talk to Teddy’s class about writing, answering some of Mr. Noah’s questions about what it’s like to make books (fun to write and draw them; less fun to publish and promote them): how cool it was to have an animated series based on one of my books (extremely cool); how old I was when I first started writing anything (sixth grade); what my favorite color, food, and animal is (black, coffee, dogs).

One minute to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

I know Teddy had hoped I’d cancel, that something else would come up at the very last second the way it used to when he was small—the calls from my mother when she was out of pain medication; from my father when he mixed up night and day again; when it was time for hospice for both of them. He’d gotten used to plans changing suddenly; from the bottom dropping out; from occasionally being picked up by someone else’s parents and eating at another family’s dinner table. He’d always looked so pained when I’d had to leave him, which wasn’t actually that often, since I took him almost everywhere with me, like I do now with the dog—and since working from home allowed us to spend a lot of time together. Then at some point he came to like it: being somewhere else. The relief of it. I think of all that he’d seen those years before he was even ten: the hospital beds, the infusion rooms, the home nurses coming and going from my parents’ house while I tried to distract him with bigger and bigger LEGO sets—and I wish again that we could get a do-over for that whole phase of his life. I barely remember going to the children’s museum or the science museum with him those years, but I can remember every hospital cafeteria and which one had the best chicken nuggets or chicken patty sandwiches as if it were yesterday. It hardly seems fair, so much precious time lost.