what really is important

2006-09-18 - 11:07 a.m.

I was all set to tell you about a weekend so long it felt like I'd taken a holiday.

I was all set to tell you of friends, laughter, wine and food. Of good DVDs and finishing a great novel, replacing worn hiking boots, Chinatown and theater, watching the sunrise from the bridge, baking muffins and whipping up maple butter, a perfect Sunday brunch, an inspiring museum and assembling an IKEA chair that felt like I was playing with an erector set.

But then the phone rang in the dark, jolting me out of a dream. I fought down my incoherence, trying to understand the words coming down the line. Trying to focus on words like 'ambulance' and 'heart.' Heart was the easy one...that's what was in motion within me, racing and dropping from my own chest.

I thought of my grandfather, the man we girls call the "Grandude," the man who's our true patriarch. And I thought of how fragile he looks when he's in a hospital bed, without his glasses.

I looked at the clock, thinking it was nearly sunrise and trying to sort out the time I should decide whether I would call out of work and drive down to the hospital. But when I looked at the clock, I saw it wasn't even midnight yet. I brought my cell phone to my room and made myself go back to sleep so I could rest up in case I needed to leave in the middle of the night.

I fell into stress nightmares. I was a poor black girl, terror-struck when I realized all but a few of my teeth had broken and disappeared*. Then I was an old man with the same missing teeth, ashamed when people were angry with me for not eating the food I was offered. They didn't realize I was too ashamed to eat it in front of them with my mouthful of gums, one tooth on the top left and about 5 on the bottom right. My stomach ached, but I was too proud to let them see me struggle with the food like an animal.

* dream symbols: "broken or unusually worn-down teeth are a sign of the deterioration of an important relationship"

When the alarm went off this morning, I got a chill as I saw the phone there on the table, reminding me that I had not dreamed the call. Was the fact that the cell didn't ring overnight a good thing, meaning there was no news or was good news? I found the hospital's phone number and discovered he'd been discharged overnight.

So now I'm living in this sigh of immediate relief and the nagging, background feeling of knowing what it's going to be like when that call is real. When we're on our own. And the rest just isn't important anymore.

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Pretend it's 10th grade. Leave me a note.

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