I sat at the head of the table tonight, my hands shaking just enough that the heavy silver spoon rattled against the china. It is a specific kind of humiliation, being seventy-six and unable to keep a piece of cutlery silent, but I suppose it served as a fitting metronome for the evening. My son, Arthur, was in the middle of one of his "practicality" lectures, his voice rising in that sharp, percussive way he learned from me. He was tearing into Leo—my grandson—about this photography business. Leo just sat there. He didn't eat. He didn't look up. He simply stared at his cooling roast beef with a look of such profound, quiet resentment that I felt a physical ache in my chest. I recognized the posture immediately. It is the stance of a man under heavy bombardment who has realized his foxhole isn't deep enough. I spent twenty-two years in the service, and I know when a man has retreated entirely into his own head to survive a superior officer. But this wasn't a drill or a field exercise. It was a Sunday dinner. Arthur was calling Leo’s aspirations "frivolous" and "unsubstantiated," using these cold, hard words like he was filing a DISCIPLINARY REPORT. He kept saying that the world doesn't pay for "artistic temperaments" and that Leo needed to find a career with a clear chain of command and a pension. The irony is almost too much to bear at my age. I watched Arthur’s face—red, tight, the jaw muscles working overtime—and I saw myself thirty years ago. I saw the exact moment I broke Arthur's own interest in music. It was a secondary REACTION, a way of protecting him from the instability I had faced coming home from my second tour. I thought I was being "operational." I thought I was giving him the tools to survive a world that I viewed through a very narrow, tactical lens. I didn't realize I was just passing down a sort of emotional calcification. I see now that it’s a form of *displacement*. Arthur isn't angry at Leo; he’s angry at the part of himself he had to kill to please me. Leo reached out to move his water glass, and I noticed how his fingers trembled, mirroring mine. He’s twenty-two. He should be full of fire, but he looked like he was waiting for a ceasefire that was never coming. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell Arthur to SHUT UP, to tell him that the world is more than a series of logistical hurdles and bank statements. But the habit of silence is a heavy weight. In my day, you didn't undermine the father at the table. Even now, with my skin like parchment and my heart fluttering like a trapped bird, that old MILITARY DISCIPLINE holds my tongue. I am a prisoner of my own making. I looked at the walls of this dining room, filled with portraits of men in uniform, men who "built things," men who "served." We look so sturdy in those frames. But looking at Leo, I realized that we are just a long line of men who didn't know how to talk to our sons. We substituted REPRIMAND for affection. We called it "guidance" because we were too afraid to call it what it was: a desperate need to control the outcome because we couldn't control our own fears. It’s a classic case of *projection*. We want our children to be bulletproof because we know exactly how much it hurts to bleed. The dinner ended with Leo excused, his plate mostly full. He left the room without a word, his shoulders hunched as if he were carrying a rucksack twice his weight. Arthur turned to me, looking for a nod of approval, a "well done, Dad." He looked so proud of his own rigidity. I just looked down at my hands. I thought about the darkroom Leo has set up in the basement, the smell of the chemicals, the way he looks when he talks about "light" and "composition." He has a vocabulary for beauty that I never permitted myself to learn. And here we are, extinguishing it. I’m sitting here now, long after they’ve gone to bed, writing this on this small screen because I can't sleep. The house is too quiet. I feel a sense of *melancholy* so thick it’s hard to breathe. I have all these memories of being "strong" and "firm," and tonight I realized they are all just entries in a ledger of loss. I gave my son a career and a sense of duty, and in exchange, I gave him a heart made of flint. And now he’s using it to spark a fire that will burn my grandson to the ground. I wonder if Leo knows that I have his back, even if I don't have the words to say it. I suspect he doesn't. He probably just sees another old man who agrees with the man shouting at him. It’s a failure of communication on a STRATEGIC level. I’ve spent my whole life defending things—borders, principles, reputations—and I never learned how to defend a boy's right to be different from me. The "bittersweet" part is that I finally see the mistake, but I am too tired, too old, and too ingrained in my ways to fix the wreckage. I’m just waiting for the lights to go out.