It’s strange, really. We used to hit this spot once every couple weeks or so when they were just little boys. The decor is the same. The menu is the same. Everything looks just the same as it did 15 years ago or so. That is to say, everything but the three guys in the photo.

It is as strange to see them grown up as young men as it is to walk by a mirror and see a middle-aged man. There is some recess in my brain just below the surface of consciousness that holds onto an image of the three of us as a much younger dad and two skinny pre-teens. It is jarring to see… this.

It was equally strange walking home with the realization that I’d just had a conversation with my “babies” about the failings of post-modernism and now post-post-modernism to leave room for even a reasonable amount of idealism and hope.

To hear my younger child say that the real problem with Jordan Peterson is that he has so many ideas (some good and some terrible) that he has become a kind of supermarket of ideals and values, many of which are entirely in conflict, so it’s easy for anyone to listen to him for a half hour and cherry pick one that aligns with their own existing biases…

Wow.

And my older boy expressing fears that social media had offered, more than anything else, every person in his generation to disappear into their own Truman Show, or their own reality show with no basis at all in reality. “Everybody is a meme of a meme.”

Oh dear.

Adult conversations must mean that they are adults. I don’t know if I was ready for this.

But mostly we laughed. We laughed at the world. We laughed at each other. We laughed at ourselves. We laughed until it hurt. We’ve had such an odd, funny, little life together. Now we are here.