Juxtaposition

It was a cold morning, and I was alone in the car when the call came the first time.  It was my mom calling, telling me that I needed to come as quickly as possible because my dad’s condition was getting worse.

It was on another cold morning just over two years later when the call came the second time, and I was alone in the kitchen of my house when I answered the phone and heard that I needed to come.  But this time it was my brother-in-law David, calling to tell me that my sister Nancy was in labor, news that I was so happy and excited to hear.

Looking back to the time just before the first call, I was expecting the call to come at some point, although on some level I believed that there could be another outcome, better news coming instead or at least the bad news being delayed for a long time.  The second time, though, I knew the call was coming soon, and I had been eagerly awaiting hearing the words at the other end of the line.  We would be gaining a new member of the family this time.

Both times when the calls came, I dropped what I was doing and frantically packed a suitcase.  Both times, as I backed out of the driveway, I promised to my husband that I would keep him posted about what was going on after I’d gotten there.  Both times as soon as I'd gotten on the road, I called my sister Jennifer to talk to her about her plans for travel from where she was in California, and then I drove in silence while so many thoughts and emotions ran through my head that I finally had to turn on some music.  When Jennifer gave me her flight information after the second call, we both realized that the departure and arrival times of her flight that day were identical to those after the first time the call had come.  And we both knew that she would again be racing the clock to get there in time, with none of us having any control over whether or not she would make it there soon enough.

Both times after I’d started my drive along the same route, I struggled to control the panic I felt rising up in my chest.  Both times, I felt desperate to talk to the person about whom the call had been made: the first time, my dad, and the second time, Nancy. I wanted to call one of the people already there but knew my call would be intrusive in the midst of what was happening there.  Both times I knew that there would be little to nothing I could do to make things any better, and yet both times I felt an almost indescribably pressing need to get there, a magnetic force pulling me east along the interstate.  As I drove, I thought about how odd it was that that particular day was just a regular day for the people in other vehicles I was passing along the road. 

I stopped for gas along the way both times, and, as the fuel pumped into the car, I texted others in my family to see what was going on and to report on my estimated time of arrival.  Both times I called Jennifer again once I got back on the road, and we talked about what we thought would be the quickest way for her to get from the airport to where I would be when she arrived.  Both times I heard the rising panic in her voice when she talked about having to be cut off from communication with the rest of us while she was in the air, and both times I assured her that I would take care of things until she could get there and that transportation would be arranged for her by the time her flight had landed.  Both times I told her that I believed she would make it there in time, and both times I could only hope that that prediction would hold true.

The first time when the call had come, my destination was my parents’ house, but the second time it was the hospital, one chosen by Nancy for her delivery because it was a different hospital from where we had been both times during my dad’s inpatient stays.  Both times when I arrived, I turned the car off and made myself take a few deep breaths before I hit the ground running.  Both times I was acutely aware that life for everyone in my family was about to change.

On both of those days, there was a flurry of text messages and emails being sent between family members across the country.  Both times, I knew my mom and my brother-in-law David were keeping things under control as I traveled, but I wanted to be there to see what was going on for myself.  After I had arrived and had checked things out, both times I reported in to the rest of the family, and only then did I feel like I could breathe. 

On both of those days, I considered driving to the airport to pick up Jennifer when her flight came in but was afraid to leave, and so both times I asked my aunt to get Jennifer to us as quickly as possible.  Both times I remember feeling relieved to be there but at the same time feeling restless, as if I needed to have something to do in the chaos of what was going on around me.  On both occasions, there was an air of surrealism in the knowledge of what was about to occur, and both times the room was filled with emotion.

Jennifer swept in with a sense of purpose like I’d seldom seen before in both cases.  Both times I watched her hug Nancy, David, and my mom, and then when she hugged me I felt such a sense of relief that she was there with us.  There was an intimacy in the room that is difficult to describe, one that created an odd sense of control in a situation that we knew could not be controlled.

The second time, the tears we cried were of joy and excitement and relief; the happiness in the room was like a salve.  Again, those of us in the room made phone calls and sent messages to others who weren’t there, this time with the news of a new beginning.

Chapter One, Part 2: The Fabric of Our Lives

Not long after my youngest sister Nancy was born, my mom crocheted an afghan blanket that ended up being kept on the back of the couch in the den.  It was half decoration, half functional item, and it was part of the landscape of the various houses in which we lived over the course of the next twenty years or so.  The colors of the yarn in the blanket were those of popular décor back in the 1970’s, mostly different shades of browns.  Looking at the blanket, though, it was easy to spot the one color in the mix that really stood out, not because it took up the most space in the pattern but because it was the brightest, a brilliant shade of orange, like the tip of a flame in a campfire that has been burning for awhile. 

The orange in that blanket is like the sport of running has been in my family over the years, something that stood out amongst whatever else was happening at the time, a mainstay or maybe even a theme sorts.  Not everybody in my family is a runner, but everyone in the family knows about running and appreciates the talent and the dedication behind it, because of what we assimilated through my dad’s enthusiasm for it. 

My dad started running when he was in elementary school; he said that he liked to race the bus to his house after school.  In high school, he was a competitive middle-distance runner on his school’s track team, and he was awarded an athletic scholarship to Troy State (now Troy University) in Troy, Alabama, after graduation from high school.  He continued to excel as a runner through his tour in Vietnam, which started a year later, and then again as a college student on the GI Bill at Auburn University. 

After he graduated from college, my dad got a job with Cook Industries, a company for which he worked for the next ten years, a time during which the company required my dad and my family to move many times.  Through it all and in the decades that followed, my dad ran, for sport, for social reasons, and for health and fitness.  I heard him say many times that he loved to run because it made it feel better, because he got to meet all kinds of people and see all kinds of things through doing it, and because he liked to have a goal.  “Plus,” he almost always added with a smile, “That way I can drink a few beers without worrying about putting on weight!”

Dad called on me to join him as a runner when I was in the fourth grade.  I’d run laps around the track here and there while I was waiting for him to finish his workout a few times in the past as a young child, but it wasn’t until I was in late elementary school that he thought I was ready for an actual training program.  With the two of us in training, there were always smelly running clothes and shoes and endless bottles of Gatorade around the house.  As a family, our weekends began to center around road races in the area in which we ran; occasionally my sisters joined in the effort too with Mom backing us up as Head Cheerleader/Nurse/Logistics Manager. This continued throughout my middle school and high school years, and then, when I became more of a recreational runner during my college years, it extended to the running days of my sister Nancy, who was also competitive in cross-country and track during her time in high school. 

During this time, Dad was typically running in excess of 100 miles per week, often in training for a marathon or some other big race in which he was set to compete.  Sometimes we cheered him on from the sidelines as spectators, and sometimes we joined him in his running efforts, whether training for an event or running in a race, always with him running along with persistence and triumph etched into the expression his face and a can-do attitude that, in victory and in defeat, through challenges and transitions, eventually also became one of the strands of the fabric of our lives as a family.