The Middle Passage

I'll leave Austin before sunrise tomorrow, the kind of dark where headlights feel like the only thing keeping the world in place. Four hours north to Dallas Fort Worth. Breakfast with Bumper. A baby shower for Halie. Then back down the same road by evening.

Halie is expecting her second child in January. A girl this time. Georgia Brooks Belyeu. Georgia for where Halie was born. Brooks for my mother's maiden name. The shower is the reason to drive. But the drive itself has already become something else in my mind. A predawn passage between memory and what comes next.

2025 has been brutal.

Early in the year, a stroke put me on my back and forced me to stare at my own mortality. I recovered. The world looked different afterward. Sharper edges. Shorter horizons.

Then March came.

Kim's accident happened March 4th. Minutes before, she left me a voice message. "Hi, just calling in to check in. I'm on my way home. Love you. Bye." I still have it on my phone.

An object flew off a passing pickup and struck her windshield. The driver didn't stop. He was apprehended about 30 days later and admitted he knew he had caused an accident. Kim went into a coma. Her children kept vigil for four days. I sat beside them, except the overnight hours when the hospital only permitted one person to remain. On March 8th came the final decision to remove life support. She was officially pronounced deceased eight minutes later. I believe her soul met Jesus much sooner.

She had been driving home from watching two of her grandchildren. Tuesday and Thursday, every week, the same rhythm. Caring for them was part of who she was. She had spent Christmas with us the year before, helping celebrate Ryder's first holiday. She would have been shopping for the littles by now. That's what she called them. The littles.

Her absence still rings in my ears. The world is quieter without her. Her death added another layer of fragility to how I think about time. It's hard to look forward without bracing for loss. The shadow of 2025 lingers even as 2026 offers the promise of new life.

The logistics of the trip are simple. Rhiannon drove from Virginia to help Halie prepare. I call her Bumpy Beagle. Bumper for short. Tessa, my ex wife and the girls' mother, is flying in from Virginia too. Rhiannon lives with her. Tessa will want to spend every minute she can with Halie and Ryder. She doesn't see them often. I understand why. When she does, she immerses herself completely.

I plan to take a quieter role. Watch. Absorb. Savor the reunion without performing. My focus will be on Rhiannon. I haven't seen her in over a year.

Halie lives with her husband Colton in an apartment just big enough for the four of them. They have Ryder, eighteen months old now, and Colton's four year old son Julian. Plus Disco, their Shepherd Mastiff mix. He's huge and rambunctious. We don't use the word step in our family. Julian is Julian. Ryder is Ryder. The baby coming in January is Georgia. No distinctions. No labels. Just family.

My father died in 2023. He was known as Grampy. The name passed to me when he passed. I'm the third in the lineage. Grampy III, if we're keeping score. I carry it now for Ryder and Julian and soon for Georgia.

I have one sibling. A younger sister. That makes me the patriarch of this branch of the Evans family tree.

Becoming the family's center of gravity didn't announce itself. It came slowly. Decisions deferred to me. Eyes glancing my way in uncertain moments. The recognition that the family's stories now run through my memory. The transition has been difficult. The position carries both dignity and isolation.

My father's voice still echoes inside me. But now it's my responsibility to steady the room. To make meaning of the family's unfolding story.

Grampy is not just a nickname. It's an inheritance of tone and temperament. Grandfather to father to son. My writing has become part of how I carry the role forward. Storytelling as stewardship.

I've spent most of my recent writing on the two generations before me. The Temple School Notebook resurrects my father, my grandfather, and intellectual ancestors like Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau. I weave them into living conversations. I haven't spent as much time writing about the two generations after me. My daughters. My grandchildren.

I used to think my desire to solve The Alcott Dilemma was about educational theory. Then I realized it was born from thinking about Halie and her children. It's an attempt to prepare them for the world they will face. The work is not abstract philosophy. It's an intergenerational design problem.

This reframes my intellectual labor. It's both legacy and act of love.

The Alcott Dilemma is about the tension between individualized, high quality learning and scalable, standardized systems. Can understanding be scaled without being commodified? That question matters because of Georgia Brooks. Because of Ryder. Because of Julian. Because I want them to grow up in a world where education honors who they are, not just what they're supposed to become.

In a world of ever increasing AI presence, conformity will become the province of AGI. The Prussian model already develops conformity. Now machines can do it better. The place to get ahead will not be in the middle anymore. It will be with those who can think creative thoughts. That's what I'm trying to build. Systems honoring the individual mind, not just training it to fit.

Brooks is the right name. My mother's influence shaped me in ways I'm still discovering. Her curiosity. Her discipline. Her quiet strength. All of it ripples through my adult life and through my daughters' names.

Rhiannon's middle name is Marie. For her grandmother. CeCe's full name is Carole Elsie Evans. Carole for a cousin who lived courageously with sickle cell disease. Elsie for both my paternal grandmother and Tessa's maternal aunt.

The names weave across generations. They act as mnemonic architecture. Each one preserves a story, a virtue, or a struggle. Through these names, the women of the family remain in active conversation with the living. Every name spoken aloud keeps the collective memory breathing.

Naming is an ethical gesture. It encodes respect for resilience and remembrance into daily language. A name is both archive and invocation.

Family continuity mirrors the educational and cultural continuity I've tried to reimagine through The Performance Architect and Communiplasticity. Both are about designing systems honoring individuality while sustaining coherence. The way a family carries forward its names and values is not unlike how a culture transmits knowledge.

The past two generations give me identity. The coming two give me purpose. My writing is the bridge between them.

The family becomes both subject and metaphor. A microcosm of the larger systems I'm trying to rebuild.

The drive itself feels symbolic before it even begins. The predawn departure. Breakfast with Bumper. The return under the evening sky. All of it mirrors the life stage I now occupy. The middle passage between memory and legacy.

I am both traveler and archivist. Witness and builder.

The patriarch's role is not to command. It's to remember. And to leave behind the scaffolding for others to build upon.

This trip will capture that moment in its living form. A man on the road between generations, tracing his family's architecture through names and stories and the unbroken work of thought and tenderness turning survival into legacy.

I'll leave before sunrise. I'll return after dark. In between, I'll hold my place in the family's ongoing story. Not at the center demanding attention. Quietly at the edge, watching the next generation grow into their names.

That's the work now. To remember well. To write it down. To make sure the scaffolding holds.