We had a guest walker today, Lilith and I, our neighbor Tom, writer, musician, father, husband, teacher. He used to think of AI as possibly benevolent, but now sees it as an engine of the apocalypse (my word). Tom is ostensibly a novelist, but one who generates much of his writing out of the material and sound of language. He teaches sci-fi and jazz literature at a local private school, one made nationally famous by its alumnus Pres. Obama. But he says he hardly reads novels now. He's tired of literature. I tell him about some recent losses, one complicated and the other less so. Later on, in a phone call with a poet friend, she said she thought language itself doesn't work any more. She spoke of losses, the losses of aging, of dying, and of communication. The loss of a belief in those national documents we used to find compelling. My friend is older, lives more or less alone, goes back to the Buddhist texts when she can. Tom's father, he realized this summer when he spent five weeks with him, is lonely. So many losses. But he renovates his two houses, making, remaking. Perhaps for his kids, maybe because it's something he knows how to do well that also passes the time. Tom's kids are good at things. One is studying in Japan this year, another is a physics whiz who wins the pole vault, and the third is happy. Two of them are deaf, including his daughter, with whom he writes music. She might minor in music, he says. We wonder about ambition, drive, where it gets you in the end. He reminds me I've had a good career. He asks about Tibetan Buddhism, having left a very strict zen center a while back. He still sits with friends. Lilith walked happily today; she likes guest walkers. For them she has pep in her step, even if she stops to sniff along the way. That is her career, as walker, diplomat, investigator, and companion. I desperately fear my loss of her.
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