It was weird to me. I take that back — I was surprised by how deep of an emotional experience it was for my Dad the first time he got into a self-driving car. He was 50, I was 15.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this.”

He was crying. Not big tears, or waterworks, but I caught him wipe away a tear. I think he knew I saw him, because he tried to make a joke — that was his normal defense for emotional events: jokes. Sometimes they were funny — he made Mom blow some water out of her nose at dinner once when we he compared Wendy Hoplite’s body to a busted can of biscuits — but most of the time they were bad. Jokes he had inherited from his grandfather — dead before I was born — and his mother — dead, too, but they ran through his blood like, I don’t know, some weird congenital deformity of the humor center of the brain.

“People are dying to get in there.”

Every single time that we passed a graveyard he said it. It became a game for my sister and me; holding our breaths until the inevitable one-liner emanated from the front.

This time he crafted a joke specifically for this moment.

“What will your mother and I talk about in the car if it’s not about how badly I’m driving?”

“How you need to exercise.”, I said. I think that I have the same defect. Jokes that aren’t really jokes. Deadpan humor. A passive-aggressive’s favorite. This wasn’t an exception, he did need to exercise. Nobody was going to confuse him with Orson Welles, but he was only in the position to definitely win footraces with people who had recently lost at least one leg.

He smirked.

“Shit, you’re probably right.”

It had been a long time since I had seen a grin like this one on my Dad’s face, as he soaked in the magic and mystery of science fiction dreams come true. He wasn’t a scientist, but he held better than the average dilettante’s understanding of most of the sciences. Most importantly, he had been a life long lover of science fiction. Film, book, whatever — sometimes I wondered why. Science Fiction, it seemed, was the realm of boys and men who never grew up. He was so serious. He worked for an ad firm. So casual and relaxed it seemed. Blue jeans to work. Flexible hours.

It wasn’t until I, too, had to enter the work force that I realized that flexible hours just meant that you were always expected to be working. And behind the nonexistent doors of the open floor plan office, there were machinations and intrigue matched only by the daytime soaps that they sneered at openly — all the while, and somewhat ironically, spending most of their time trying to suss out the best celebrity to hawk the latest diet or skin care fad to the people that watched the soaps so diligently.

Also strange to me was that it wasn’t exactly like this was the first time anybody had ever seen a self-driving vehicle. They had been in development for more than a decade by the time that the upward sliding doors swooped open for my father on that busy New York City sidewalk. This was it, though, this was the technology that he had been reading about his entire life, finally here – scientific fantasy made manifest in the bubble-shaped car that honked as it pulled up, letting you know that it was here for you.

If I had to guess why he cried, I would say it was the melancholy epiphany that this was probably the last great human innovation that he would get to see. The others — the bio-mechanical organs, Strong AI, the Mars base — those weren’t in the cards for him. As far as his cone of experience was concerned, those other fantasies of the page would always remain there, drawn in the shade of a great oak tree on the yellowed pages of his Phillip K. Dick book. That would be my guess.

This was before he learned about his cancer. This was before he was disappointed that science couldn’t stop his body from killing itself. He never cried about that.

“Close enough, we’ll walk from here.”

Those were his last words. Outside. Far away from the clogged streets of Manhattan. In the earthy woods, with me, my sister, and my Mom, we watched him drift away. Dreaming.