Dial Tone

“Hello?” answered David, picking up the kitchen phone.  He put his finger in one ear to try to drown out the clinking of silverware and dishes coming from the living room.

“Father, I just want you to listen,” the man on the line said calmly.  David could hear the faint nervous crinkling of paper.

“Father, I am sorry for everything I ever did and said, and I’m sorry that I’m not everything you wanted to me to be.  I tried to make you proud, but nothing I did seemed to make you happy.  Please, just tell me you love me and I’m not a bad person.  That’s all I want to hear from you.  If you can’t tell me that, then I understand and will never bother you again.”

“Look, kid.  I don’t know who you are, and I damn sure don’t have a son,” said David, hanging up the phone in disgust.

Sighing, David made his way to the dinner table.  “Who was that?” asked his wife as she scooped some mashed potatoes out of a serving bowl.

David shrugged and said, “I don’t know.  It was a wrong number.”

Epiphany of the Spheres

I just had an epiphany and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever come to understand.

I have always had trouble wrapping my mind around how big the universe could possibly be and how small we are.

Then I though about Carl Sagan's statement of how we are a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" and I realized something while looking at dust floating in a ray of sun.

If you think about it, on one of those specks of dust, there are probably hundreds of smaller bits of microscopic dust that comprise the single mote.  On any given microdust bits, there are atoms that make it up, and on any given atom, there are electrons orbiting a nucleus.  We are an electron, orbiting a nucleus, on one of many microdust bits, and that one mote of dust is out galaxy.

Then I looked around, and I could only see so much dust.  All the dust I could see in that one room...that is as much of the galaxy as we can see. 

Now, if you think about it, there is dust in all the houses in the world, and all around us.  Each mote of dust is a galaxy, and all the dust on this planet is about the size of the universe.  We're just a single electron on a single molecule of one of those motes.

Head Trauma

I must have been babbling incoherently at the hospital, because when I asked the doctors how my husband was, the only response I got was confused looks.  To be fair, though, I was just in a serious wreck.  I don’t remember anything they said to me while I was in the hospital.  Everything was just a blur.

What I do remember is getting home.  My husband took extra good care of me since my leg was broken.  I didn’t want him working too hard, because he had a head injury.  I knew he did because nothing he said was coherent in the least.  He made gestures, though, that made his intentions clear.  Some of the best ones were a bowl and churning spoon for food, drinking motion to ask if I was thirsty, and a toilet flushing gesture to ask if I needed to use the bathroom.

As the weeks passed, he began to regain his coherence, and he was starting to understand what I was saying to him.  After about four months, everything was back to normal.  Well, almost.

Everything would have been well and good if that man had never spoken to me about my bedridden state.  He told me that he was worried after the first few weeks when I was still babbling incoherently.

Gallbladder

“Don’t worry, Dad.  You’ll be home soon enough.  Then you can lie down in your bed.  It’ll be more comfortable than this old car, for sure,” said Jeremy, who kept glancing over at his father in the seat next to him.  His father was shifting around uncomfortably in his seat.  The two were coming home from the hospital following his father’s successful gallbladder surgery.  Jeremy was happy to hear his father did well.

“See?” asked Jeremy with a smile as the car pulled into his father’s driveway.  “Told you it wasn’t going to be that long.  Let’s get you into the house.”

As he wheeled his father into the house, his mother appeared and waved a wooden spoon at her husband.  “I told you all those cheeseburgers would do you no good,” she said, scolding him for his diet.

“Woman,” he groaned.  “I told you I had to eat my own burgers.  I ran the joint.  It would have looked bad otherwise.”

“Whatever,” she replied.  “Oh, and Jeremy, honey.  Someone from the hospital keeps calling.  You know I don’t answer calls from the hospital, not after what happened there the last time I went there.”

She was referring to her visit to the hospital the previous year.  While she was there, she caught a cold from someone in the waiting room.  It was just something she never got over.

“Well if they call again, I’ll answer,” answered Jeremy.  “I just have to put Dad in the bed.  Did they leave any messages?”

“Oh, no.  They only called three times, but they never let it go to the answering machine.”

Jeremy shrugged and helped his father into the bed.  It wasn’t long after that the phone rang again.  Jeremy sighed and picked up the phone.

“Hello?  Mr. Evans?” asked Jeremy’s father’s doctor.

“Yes, doctor?”

“Oh, good.  Did you make it home okay?”

“Yes, and he’s resting just fine.”

“Ah, about that.  The staff and I were concerned when we saw you leaving.  Are you sure everything is okay?  I know that your mother was hard to deal, but your father must be something else.”

“Oh, I’m fine and so are they.  We just don’t care for the hospital is all, so that’s why we might have seemed a bit edgy about the whole ordeal.  Dad can be grumpy, but he’ll calm down when he gets to feeling better.  Thank you for checking up on us, though,” said Jeremy, hanging up before the doctor could respond.

“What did they want sweetie?” his mother asked from the other room.

“Oh, it was just Dad’s doctor calling to check up on us.  Nothing to worry about.

At the hospital, the doctor sighed as he hung up the phone.  “Nurse, do you have the number for Jeremy’s therapist still?”

“Yes sir, why?”

“Well, staff said he was wheeling an empty wheelchair out of the building, and he never got over his mother dying from her pneumonia.  I don’t think he took his father’s death today any better.”