I’m 38 and I realized last weekend that my dad has started walking me to my car when I leave his house — something he never used to do — and the walk is always five seconds longer than it needs to be, with one extra small comment, one extra small wave, and I understood on the drive home that the walk isn’t a goodbye, it’s a quiet request for one more minute that he doesn’t know how to ask for out loud
I sat in the rental car for ten minutes at the end of my father’s road last weekend, engine off, hands on the wheel, unable to make myself drive. I was not crying. I was not on the phone. I was doing that specific thing where you have just understood something about a person you …