Ringing

Darlings. These are for you. I've missed you too. Thank you for your notes and letters. There are no excuses. I should have written to you more often. But, sit with me for a minute, will you? You have your coffee or cuppa? Okay then, let's visit.

I've noticed recently, there are several things which wake one from a dead sleep: real or figurative.

A phone which rings at nine at night when your baby is horrendously sick and you have finally managed to get the torrent to slow enough so that she can sleep for a minute next to you, is one of those things. Even if she were well, I hate the time I have the children cuddled in their short little-hood to be infringed upon. Who doesn't? They will only be babies for about five minutes, the next thing you know they are deeming certain forks at the table, "inappropriate."

As life has progressed, I have had all those late night calls that somewhere the world was on fire and someone needed informed: In graduate school on a paramedic unit the sound of a phone ringing in the blackness of night likely meant someone's future literally was ablaze, and in my career when bombings or acts of nature occurred and it involved colleagues or our partners, then the phone would ring and ring.

The call that woke my tiny girl and I that night was not an emergency though, at least not any of the sort I've known. But it hammered the silence in a house that had struggled for it, deserved it. And it hammered a lot of other things too.

Sometimes a call is not just a call. Sometimes it is a wake up call: Your baby is sick. You choose the important thing now; take that call and allow the day to overtake the night and the sanctity of a home. Or you take your stand for the world you have made outside your work.

All of a sudden, you realize, only in theory, why the famous line in the sand was drawn at the Alamo, and you know just where yours is located.

My line is at seven pm in the evening. After that, the caller risks waking me in more than one way.

That is to say, gorgeous ones, I'm back.