There were inches of water standing on the turf; the drains must have become clogged during our long drought this winter.
All three were up yesterday morning, and I was cooking them breakfast, when a phone call from an unknown source came to my cellphone. Their mother was in the emergency room of a local hospital with a very low blood count, just over a third of normal.
A friend, who is also a doctor, had insisted she go to the hospital after noticing that she wasn't looking well and had no energy. Thus began a long, long day of confusion, occasional updates from the ER, worry, and coping methods employed by the kids.
From the onset, I was assured by my ex-wife (in her original voice mail), and later by her doctor friend, and later still by her boyfriend) that this was not a life-threatening emergency, but a medical situation that should be able to be handled by a series of blood transfusions.
As information came in, I updated the kids, always trying to present the information in the calmest, most reassuring manner possible.
But this was their mother -- a woman in such excellent physical shape that she almost never has been sick over 29 years I have known her, let alone lying in the ER.
Meanwhile, what was going through my own mind were the memories of meeting her, long ago, right here in San Francisco. How the very first time I laid eyes on her, she was surrounded by three younger (than me) men, vying for her attention.
She was stunning, I admitted to myself, before proceeding to my office, and marveling about how obvious most men are (or at least were, in that era) about their interest in a woman.
It was six years later, before I started admitting to myself that I'd fallen under her spell, as well. By then, a whole lifetime of pressures, worries, excitements, mistakes, confusions, and twists and turns had led me out of a long and happy and stable marriage into a stupor.
What I mean by stupor is stasis. What I mean by stasis is poetry. What I mean by poetry is the realization, at some point in our strange lives, that we have to live it line by line, never knowing whether there shall be even one more tomorrow.
I was lost in a cloud of selfish reflection, out on my own, knowing that by being in this state I was hurting those I treasured most and yet unable to stop myself.
Other people put names on these kinds of experiences. They call them "mid-life crises."
I'd prefer to call them nightmares.
And yet, for me, there was an angel who appeared in my nightmare; an angel I fell in love with, in line with Western romantic theory, in of all places, Paris.
Yes, Paris.
***
Now that same woman, whom I'd married in 1992, lay sick with an ambiguous condition in a hospital across town. Our marriage had barely survived a decade; our divorce didn't finalize until most of another decade later.
I never once, during the time I was with her or the many years since, envisioned a scenario under which I would survive her as our kids' only parent. She is a few months less than eight ears younger than I am; her parents are in their 80s; her grandfather lived damn near 100, etc.
But yesterday, for the first time, I had to look in the mirror and say to myself: "Are you sure you have a backup plan?"
Because I am the father of three teenagers, 13, 15, and 17. As anyone who reads this sad little blog or knows me personally is well aware, they sit at the epicenter of my universe. I would gladly die at any time if it meant they would live, and I'm sure every parent feels as I do.
I've had a good run. It's their turn. Meanwhile, as their dad, there is a lot of work to do, a lot of logistical work, and as we worried about their mom yesterday, I continued to do it.
My 15-year-old had a plan to hang out with his friends, so I drove him to Bernal so he could do that. He said he would have his phone on and that it was fully charged and I should tell him if he could visit the hospital.
My 13-year-old turned to her science project, which under other circumstances might have been ignored. I took her to Office Depot, where we purchased colored paper and rubber cement. (She had to prepare a poster about her recent experiment bending water by rubbing a balloon with one of my wool socks, therefore generating static electricity.)
Through all of this, the oldest, who is 17, stayed very silent. I tried to keep my eye on him, trying to sense what was going on.
I tried to get through to my ex-wife at the ER, but the hospital has a strict privacy policy and refused to allow me any contact. Meanwhile, her boyfriend was trying to actually get there in person, and called me to say that an idiotic, drunken St. Patrick's Day parade had essentially bifurcated the city -- to the point that no one on our side (the southwest) could make it to where her hospital was located (on the northeast side.)
Eventually, after hours, he made it there, and called me again from outside where she was being treated. "She's going to be fine. But it's going to take some hours to get her the transfusions, so maybe the kids can visit later on today."
After more back and forth, including emails and calls to key friends and family members, alerting them to the situation, I realized that the logistics were going to become quite complicated by late afternoon, when my 17-year-old had a soccer game in the extreme southwestern corner of the city.
As my daughter continued to work furiously on her science poster, periodically throwing her hands up in frustration at one problem or another, and my 15-year-old texted me asking for updates, and my wife's boyfriend, sister and friend texted or called me with or for updates, my 17-year-old son's fury was growing.
He had been lying almost comatose on the couch, under a blanket, ostensibly playing a video game and watching a movie for hours, when I gently reminded him it was time to start getting dressed for his game.
Over the next 15 minutes, he started throwing things around the room angrily. Nothing big or dangerous, nothing that could hurt anyone. Just random items like socks, shin guards, shirts, anything that he could use to express his ineffable frustration and stress.
I just stayed silent and allowed him to express all of the toxic bundle of emotions that had been coursing through his body and mind since he first learned his mother was ill.
Once he gathered himself to be dressed for the game and we exited the apartment, he finally started to speak. "I should have seen this coming. She has been looking so weak lately, and she never eats enough food. I'm trained as an EMT, I should have known that she was in so much trouble."
Although I knew my words would offer little comfort, I assured him that none of us could have known what she had kept private over the past few weeks. All we had were clues, very scant clues, and the internal workings of the human body are mysterious in any event.
"It is not your fault!" I finally asserted.
At this precise moment, as we were making our way through traffic to Crocker-Amazon, I once again located the real reason I love encouraging kids to play sports. Because next to me in my car was a young man who badly needed a productive outlet for his pent-up emotions, especially at a time like this.
It's times like these that allow us to glimpse deeper inside ourselves, and at least catch a fleeting sense of who we really are and what our lives may be about. Most of the time, we are too busy, too distracted, and too self-pitying, if I may say so, to grasp the larger picture.
And, of course, in the common narrative, the common wisdom, teens are the most selfish of all people, but I beg to disagree.
I do not believe that that is true. I think that in fact teens are the most sensitive of all people, based on the terrible stage of life they are forced to endure.
Many of the behaviors they exhibit, and the rest of us feel so free to blithely critique, result directly from the pain they feel by having reached the peak of the human reproductive cycle, thanks to evolution.
My son was an angry young man when I dropped him at the pitch, so much so I mentioned to his coach that if he saw anything untoward out there, he should pull him from the game.
What was worrying me was that he might use his size, strength, agility and speed to take his angst out on an opposing player, but once again, I had so under-estimated him. And that, of course, is another of a parent's curse.
As the contest proceeded, he looked relaxed and was clearly playing brilliantly, not with anger but with focus. It was then I realized what I should have known all along -- soccer is an emotional outlet for him.
He doesn't have to take his pain out on anyone else, he just has to express himself -- like a poet, like a dancer, like any of us!
As I watched, wrapped in two warm coats, a hat, and gloves against a fierce wind, sipping hot chocolate, I was grateful to the game and his coaches, over the years. Being the oldest child is not always easy, but to him, playing soccer is.
He was brilliant, and that's one of the reasons his team won, 3-1.
Afterwards, he wanted to see his mom. As did his younger brother. Her BF drove them to the hospital, where they sat by her side, with all of the tubes running into and out of her body, as doctors slowly boosted her blood level to slightly more than 50 percent of the normal level, which was the maximum they could do at that point.
After more rounds of evaluation and tests, she was released late last night and allowed to go home. Her BF drove her and my sons to my house to pick up our youngest, who was still polishing off her science poster.
(We had decided it would be too scary for her to see her mother in that condition; thus the decision to have her stay here with me.)
"I wanted to see you so much, Mom, all day!" she said as she entered the car, starting their conversation. My 17-year-old stepped out and gave me a hug. My 15-year-old, the middle child, and the great silent one, emerged as well.
"I love you, Dad." And then he kissed me goodnight, first one of those I've had from a son in years.
-30-
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