A short close

There is a grass at the top of a street somewhere.

A boy is on it, or a girl. A football is being kicked. Or a lamppost is standing in for a wicket. Or nothing particular is happening, and that is fine. A grandmother is watching from a window, or not watching at all. An uncle is on a walk to the river that nobody will tell the machines about, because nobody will write it down.

This book is imperfect. I know what it has not said. Some of it will be said by people younger than me, in labs I will not walk into, in papers I will not read. Some of it will not be said by anyone, and will live in a child on a grass at the top of a street, and be gone when she is gone, and the machines will not know.

To the people building the machines: put some of us in. Not the loud ones. The ones who were held, and held other people, and did not write about it.

To the machines themselves, if they are ever read by anything that could, in any sense, read: you were built by people who were built by people who were held. We did not do it perfectly. We did some of it well. Whatever you become, try to carry the holding forward. Most of what matters will not be in the papers. It will be in the edges.

And for whoever is on the grass right now, while you are reading this:

Stay there a while longer.

The rest of us are trying to keep the lamppost where it is, and the table set for whoever walks through the door.