Host and Guest

“Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.” Evelyn Waugh

Consider those couples in seagoing mail days when letters were read after a hundred things more recent had happened and emotions had changed,

giving the words as much currency as a headline in a hurricane, and yet those explorer/home fires bonds thrived on the prospect of deliberate absence, planned for and even welcomed as a test of love.

It’s my fantasy, born of having hardly been his on-site parent, that they’re a positive precedent for proving oneself steadfast by pursuing the relationship

as a kind of thought experiment, like a room standing in for a mind standing in for a home.

- Michael Milburn