Let's Do the Time Warp, Yeah

When I got home from school yesterday, I had two things on my mind--a walk with Finn and a cold beer to follow, two activities guaranteed to help me savor my "weekend" time.  Before I could hang up the dog leash and dry my shoes, though, my mom had called, worried about back pain.  After talking with the nursing staff at the Landing, it was decided that my mom's pain shouldn't wait until Monday to be addressed. (Is there any greater distorter of time than an ailment taking root just as the doctor's office closes for the weekend?)

I allowed myself a moment to lament the untouched beer, and then headed into traffic to get my mom.  My yen for yeast was soon replaced by relief, gratefulness that I had been there to get her call. Over the next four hours--the first two and a half of which went surprisingly quickly--there was a calm that my mom and I shared, an odd steadiness that quieted and slowed us, despite our jarring surroundings.

The Emergency Room staff was great--both efficient and caring.  In between their visits to our room, I found myself watching my mom, and wondering about the odd nature of time.

Time is a weird beast, a surprisingly unreliable measure, despite all of its precise proportions.  An infant has no respect for time, propelled only by the immediacy of its needs.   By my thirties, time had become viscous, too slick to slow down, leaving me breathless in its wake.  And there, in the Emergency Room,  time was something else entirely for my 88-year-old mother.

By 9 p.m., as my mom and I left the hospital--medical concerns put to rest--I wondered if time were better represented by the slow stretch of warm taffy or the staccato outbursts of Pop Rocks. Time, however, is uninterested in my need to rein it in and understand it.  It is both taffy and Pop Rock. Quite possibly, all at once.

Awake by 3:30 a.m.--curse the clock that ticks off the endless seconds!--I again faced the wildness of time, its nature utterly incomprehensible to me.  Under the weight of warm blankets, held tight in the darkness of a winter's night, I whispered a prayer that time might be kind to my mother.  That she might be swimming in gentle dreams framed in a timeless, warm light, unconcerned by the clock at her bedside.