Does anything get the heart beating faster than the sound of the phone ringing at 1:00 in the morning? It’s amazing how the mind can race through a plethora of terrible possibilities in the three or four seconds it takes to grab the phone off of the receiver – or delve deeply into one or two of them. (You imagine that the ringing phone signifies that someone in particular has died, and you’re already imagining what the funeral will be like. Or am I the only person weird enough to do that?)
Fortunately, the phone call we received was nothing as terrible as we might fear. Kathy doesn’t like me going into too much detail about personal events in our lives, so I’m not going to mention Kathy’s dad or the St. Mary’s ER or anything about kidney stones or 7-millimeters. Let’s just say that it could have been worse and that everyone we love is still with us as of this writing and will be for the foreseeable future.
But such a moment really underscores for me the reality of living with the unwritten script that is our lives. Nobody can know what tomorrow’s chapter will bring- when the phone will ring- and who will be on the other day or what they will be saying. And I guess we just hope that we’re somehow as ready as we can be for those unanticipated moments when the script says “Suddenly, the phone rings. . . “
I was also reminded during my brief time at the hospital (Kathy was there a lot longer because she didn’t have to work today) of how good she is in these kind of situations. She’s serious but not like Meryl Streep doing a death scene. . . she’s fun and relaxed but not like Ellen DeGeneres doing a comedy monologue. She manages to achieve just the right sort of even-keeled calm that one wants more than anything – a sense that everything will be fine somehow. And as she sat there talking with her dad, it was fun to feel the warmth of a daughter who adores her dad and a dad who adores his daughter . . . Even a beige- walled room in the ER can’t stay cold and sterile for long in the presence of that!
pictured: the clock as I climbed back into bed last night- Kathy came back much later – but without a single word of complaint.