When the granddaughters are in school I sometimes eat lunch alone in our formal dining area. Those are times when I feel like the old man sitting at his dinner table toward the very end of 2001: A Space Odyssey--that point in life when, after all that technology and all those conquests, there are times when one still has no choice but to sit and eat alone, without any human interaction whatsoever, and use a crystal goblet that, despite the time and resources it took to create it and the amount of money one was willing to pay for it, can still fall to the floor and smash to smithereens in seconds.

(But now when I don't want to be alone I eat in M.'s cafe.)