I learned about the announcement via Discord at about 20,000 feet (Southwest's Wi-Fi could use some help).

But of course I couldn't really do much in terms of looking up tributes when I was getting throughput akin to 14.4K speeds (ask your parents).

Thankfully, some 50 feet above ground level at Sky Harbor over the south runway, I have something new to worry about: a sudden 10,000-foot climb. Not the sort you do on a normal takeoff, but rather the sort where the engines start making noises you simply don't hear on a passenger flight. No one was alarmed, but we talked with our neighbours about how usually a descent onto a runway ends with a landing.

The pilot, and I think rightly so, gave us about 10 minutes of circling completely around the airport (once again giving us an approach out of the east guaranteed to provide a long taxi back to Terminal 4) before coming on the intercom to let us know that a takeoff had stalled on the runway, and as such, the option other than pitching the fuck up (not his exact words) was hitting a stationary object directly in our path. (This was at roughly 1405 MST^[this is correct for Oct. 29; most of Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, and I first changed a clock when I was 18 in college], and I'll be curious to see if a near miss is reported on.)

You might be thinking, OK: So an actor died and you didn't. And that's fair as far as I've gotten in my day.

I'm a bit out of sorts when I finally meet up with my mom, who'd arrived from New Mexico nearly two hours earlier. I've not been able to vape for at this point six hours, and learning you narrowly avoided being a statistic gets the ol' adrenaline going.

PHX now has a "Sky Train" that takes one to the rental-car area, which we had to board, and my mom at this point needed a wheelchair for this odyssey. This of course means it's best if I drive.

Well, the entire fucking airport has been reconfigured in terms of traffic since last I actually drove in Phoenix. Being in a rental, one has to be careful, but this is not a city where driving defensively is rewarded. My mom of course is telling me that I needed to take this exit or that one, "turn here" ... that sort of thing.

I got us to the hotel at least a half hour earlier than her routing would have led to. But that's what happens when you apply 1990 routing to a 2026 layout.

I headed to Fry's (it's a grocery store here; fun fact: The Fry's grocery store is related to the defunct electronics retailer, hence it starting out as outpost.com) to pick up water and a six pack (my adrenaline was not going back to baseline), and cracked one open as we discussed plans for the afternoon.

It should be mentioned here that we are here to spread my dad's ashes, nearly a year since he died.

She wanted to scout out the entrances to trails on Mummy Mountain that used to start across the street from our house but have long since been replaced by multimillion-dollar homes. I'm pretty sure we found one that still makes sense up a road you only know exists if you grew up hiking there, but we're not going to be able to make it to the spot that would have made the most sense.

At this point, we've lost light and are ready for dinner. New issue: Everywhere that existed in the '90s no longer does. I head up Scottsdale to Shea, expecting a Macaroni Grill just before the intersection, but it's gone. So, I head into the shopping center with the Safeway we started going to after the one on Camelback shut down.

I did point out that my phone suggested Ruth's Chris a couple of miles back, but that was a nonstarter. Neither of us was dressed correctly.

So I pull through what seems like a gateway to nothing. "This will get us over the the Harkins side." And on that side we find a wonderful Italian place. Quick, friendly service, fantastic mango hefeweizen. We dine al fresco despite my mom's misgivings that it will get too cold ... in Phoenix ... in October ... by 7 p.m., she does indeed secure a table outdoors while I park the car after dropping her off. (Yep, that's now my parent, not my grandparent.)

Much has gone through my mind in the 49 weeks and some change since Pop's death. It was kinda nice to be able to leave it at back of mind in the ensuing time, but that's not why we're here just now.

All things end. Not just all good things.

But between the news about Stewart, my reason for being in Scottsdale in the first place and having my first brush with mortality that wasn't my own fault, I decided the heavy conversations need to come first. Because my mom won't live forever, either, and she's now needing to be dropped off at a restaurant, so that's a bit of an indicator that if you want to actually have the talks you need to, best to do that while the opportunity is available.

I eased in. She had a lightbulb moment when I mentioned, "Haven't you ever noticed that I tend to say things from TNG in standard conversation? No kid says 'avail yourself,' and my cadence in terms of when to use contractions and when to skip them stems directly from the writers of Star Trek."

Murmur of agreement.

"So, then, why is it that you and Pop did everything to avoid accepting neurodivergence as part of my issues growing up?"

Now she's confused.

"OK, as an example, dropping out of UW" -- mind you, I'm saying this wearing the sweatshirt I got from the bookstore on my 1996 campus visit -- "because I was so infuriated by having to write 'Hello, World' despite over a decade in programming that I decided the entire system was broken."

Here, there's a bit of recognition.

I mention that over the past few years, as I've entwined myself further and further into the burner community, the recurring motif is "how is it that no one told you that you were on the spectrum?"

"Something I've seen reading about ASD that pops up with some regularity is 'justice sensitivity.' Now consider how I ended up in journalism. Not because I wanted to be a journalist, but I had to call out incorrect framing, leading to a terrible first column that then got edited to make me sound racist, and the cherry on top of that was the art that ran with it. A normal person does not vow to take over the entire section because the initial problem has now been compounded. But once I had a goal, I was laser focused."

"Well, back then, we knew you were smart, and awkward, but no one really talked about autism. It was reserved for kids who couldn't function."

"Remember how I refused shoes with laces after learning about Velcro?"

"Oh, yeah, you hated those laces."

"Because they were unnecessarily complex."

A beat.

"We really didn't know what to do with you. We tried to keep you interested in things, but we both failed in a lot of ways."

From here, it goes into details about both my parents' upbringings that I knew about but hadn't before heard distilled.

The reasonable takeaway is now I'm a lot less stressed about the next five days. I may not like all the places we go, but availing myself of the opportunity to have the conversation I couldn't with Pop seems prudent.

And I suspect Jean-Luc Picard would agree.