August 25. My mother replied. During the three years of her long-distance relationship with my father, from Holland to Germany, in the late fifties, they had no telephone. She wrote a letter every day.

August 24. My daughter wants to know for school how we communicated when we were the age she is now, thirteen. I answer in detail, as if she had broken a dam inside of me. In 1982: letters, telephone charged by the minute, long-distance calls dangerously expensive. And, of course, the phone is plugged into the wall. She also wants to know how it was with her grandparents, about which I know almost nothing. I pass on the questions curiously.

August 23. Another morning with the team of which one half is in Armenia and the other half in Utah. In the afternoon, alone, developed the code with the usual fumbling concretization. It’s probably what I’m objectively best at – if you define it by how many there are in the world who are even better.

August 22. My goals on the piano are, in that order: 1) improvisation, 2) composition, 3) accompaniment, 4) play other people’s music. To get better at 1-3, I have to do 4 to a much greater degree than if it was my only goal.

August 21. Dental cleaning that felt like my teeth were getting ripped out. The specialist undoubtedly knew what she was doing. “Now your fight-or-flight reflex kicks in”, she commented gleefully, reminding me every few seconds to relax again. She told funny and frivolous stories of which I understood hardly twenty percent because of her dialect, but then I couldn’t answer anything anyway. She advised me to enjoy the pain. I was glad when it was over after an hour, but also glad that it hadn’t been over for an hour.

August 20. Practiced piano. Progress incredibly slow. If it were just a matter of learning specific pieces, it would be easy to judge my progress. But I want to learn techniques that I can then use productively, on the fly. And am I making any progress with that? Either I can use the technique or I can’t, and as long as I can’t, it is hard to believe that I will, indeed, be able to use it in such a spontaneous way, eventually.

Back in Manhattan at eleven in the evening. Coming out of the subway, the unmistakable feeling that fall has begun.

Photos in which my daughter unexpectedly has the face of an adult.

August 19. I wonder how much of my childhood fascination with science fiction was that I imagined being able to experience the world described in it myself – in an unimaginably distant future, the year 2000 perhaps. That is no longer the case today. But I am looking for escape routes.

August 18. My daughter makes a roller coaster edit and for the music she uses Blue Monday. I say that when this song came out I was as old as she is now. Those sentences that, for oneself, sound so spectacular, and for a child, completely irrelevant.

August 17. The seven and a half miles again. Was easier this time. Hard to believe how deep a hole I have to work my way out of, and only because for a couple of weeks, I’ve been running a little less than usual.

August 16. We sit together and have opinions about technical and political issues. It is boring to have opinions.