Transitioning

The old gives way to the new, the new becomes reality, the old becomes a dream.  I went to school one day to tell them that I would be out for awhile, that my father was in an auto accident and was still in intensive care.  I went around to my teachers and got my assignments.  Is this what I had been doing, I wondered?  It seemed like a cartoon joke, some predictable thing with a predictable punch line.  I felt myself a man in a diving suit watching through a pane of glass moving in that slow motion way while all about people flitted and darted around me just out of reach, silly, frivolous, happy.  I left campus as quickly as I could.  

Relatives began to show up to see my father, first my aunt and uncle from the coast, my mother's sister who had known my dad for thirty years, then my relatives from Ohio, my father's two sisters and his oldest sister's husband.  They each went to the hospital and saw my father and came away shocked and saddened, but they did not carry the sadness around with them the way I had.  When we went to dinner, they would talk about how horrible it was, then the conversation would turn on how lucky he was to be alive and the endless speculation about "if he had bee wearing a seat belt," and then, in a little while, to something else entirely, and there would be a casual comment that led to laughter.  My father was alive and he was being taken care of, and he would get out of the hospital one day and life would continue.  That is the way it was for them.  It had to be.

They came to see me in the little cracker box house, shocked, I knew, at seeing where my father was living, and they did not stay long.  It was odd for them, too, that I was suddenly thrust upon them as a person rather than as an appendage of my father, and there was a palpable awkwardness to deal with.  

And then they were gone and I maintained the routine, going to the hospital, sitting and waiting, seeing my father for moments at a time, then sitting again in the lobby.  I did my homework, but that did not take long and I was done with the semester in a couple of days.  I ate at the hospital cafeteria which was vegetarian since it  was owned by the Seventh Day Adventist, and  surprisingly, the food was good.  And for the first time, I began buying my own groceries.  There was a health food store near the hospital, and I went there to shop.  I bought all sorts of things I'd never known of before and loaded up on cans of Loma Linda products, especially the fake meats made of soybeans.  I had decided to become a vegetarian, mostly, I think, to make cooking easy, but there were other reasons, too.  I cleaned the house and did the laundry and began to pay the bills.  At night, I would go back to the little cracker box house and watch TV, staying up later than I used to, watching "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson who seemed to me to be the television equivalent of the life I had read about in Playboy magazine.  And I was enamored.  

Somewhere, I had picked up a copy of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and one day sitting on my father's bed, I read it cover to cover.  I wanted to read more.  

In a few more weeks, my father was out of intensive care and moved to another room, and the old routine was ended.  The intensive care unit was always dark and close and serious and womb-like.  The people there were quiet and scared and even the nurses had talked in hushed voices.  But they had come to know me and they seemed to like my father with whom they had begun to joke as he got stronger and healthier.  And now that was gone.  

The new room had a big picture window that looked over a lake. There was a television in the room and people talking in the hallways.  The visiting hours were extended and noisy.  The rooms were a beehive of activity.  And as it turned out, Tommy's girlfriend's mother was a nurse on that floor, so she was taking care of my father every day.  

Then it was time for me to return to school.  I had been away a month, and going back was hard.  There were the puzzled looks and the questions and my reluctant explanations and the awkwardness of having been left out of things, but in truth, it did not seem as if anything had happened while I was gone.  Every day, in each class, they seemed to be where they were before I left, slouching along the educational highway at a snail's pace, the tired teachers praying for the year to come to an end.  Having done my assignments sitting in those hospital waiting rooms, I had gotten ahead of everyone else.  What a waste, I realized, all of this was and had been.  One more semester of school.  Just one.