The boy has gone to Phoenix, Arizona.
Information is scant from a son to a parent, and it was only a couple of weeks ago he casually mentioned to us over dinner at the end of a sentence asking for the salt that he was heading over there.
Phwooaar, we thought as one, Phoenix, Arizona.
Phwooaar!
The baby-boomer children have absolutely no idea what they are doing half the time. Well, most of the time, really. How on earth are we meant to survive three months without his technical knowledge?
I may well rank in the upper percentiles of humanity with three-fourths of an arts degree, but I can barely distinguish between a defibrillator and an electric toothpick dispenser. How then will I be able to series-link programmes on the MySky remote?
The computer will go down first. This is a given.
I will try and fix it with the proud jutting-jaw stubbornness common to fathers who grew up in a time when everything was moron simple, when there weren't sons with IT degrees.
But I will do something very very wrong, and by the time the boy has a look, it will be, as they say in the American south, day-ed. But he will be able to look at it, he has installed software that enables him to see the insides of our computer, even from Phoenix, Arizona. Thank the Lord.
As the years have gone by, the boy has become more and more intelligent, and I have become more and more stupid.
This is not just ageing, I know there has been biochemical atrophy, even though the raft of doctors who monitor me daily claim this is bumf.
But the boy has been kind.
The cheeky cackle he would present as a teenager when I crashed and burned from technical error has been replaced with condescension and a thin-lipped patrician smile, even though I am meant to be the patrician, wise beyond my many years.
Consequently, the day before he left, I did not take him into the library, put my hand on his shoulder and impart sage advice about twisting turning life and Arizona's many rattlesnakes. A real man knows when he has reached his ceiling of incompetence, even if it means banging his head.
The boy has even strode ahead of us aesthetically. This is the lowest blow parents should ever have to bear. We have honed our taste for decades, we are sure we know the right stuff for the right reasons.
But now, when we show interest in a movie, our son invariably informs us we won't like it. There have been excellent reviews, we say, it sounds good. It is good, he says, but you won't like it.
We are insulted, there is a veiled suggestion here we are thick. We watch the movie. We don't like it. He gives us a thin-lipped patrician smile.
At precisely what point did someone who likes gangsta rap amass the intellectual acumen to humiliate us in this way?
The boy has even learned to cook a genuinely tasty meal.
I would have been far happier had he stabbed me in the scrotum with a fork.
I am the man-cook in the house, my Fusion Asian Surprise meals would reduce a Master Chef field to onion peel. But I don't get to cook any more. He even makes glorious chips better, if you can believe this, than the bags of banditos in the freezer. Which I make really well. He cuts those real potatoes so thin.
The three months the boy is away may give us time to sort ourselves out as grown-ups, to recapture the fire and skill we had in the 1960s, the verve, the teeming intelligence, the mojo and the moxy.
Surely we can do this, surely when he returns, all the electronic appliances in the house, even the new 50in telly, won't be melted black and broken. But sadly, I doubt it.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
