One thing I fear, as I imagine anyone with a nonagenarian parent fears (or a parent of any age, or a child, or, or, or), is the late night/early morning phone call. Nothing good happens at that hour. Well, at precisely, 4:39AM, I got it — only I didn’t get it. I have my phone on DO NOT DISTURB, but of course I allow calls from my father, the Hebrew Home, Melissa, Nina, and my brother and sister to get through any time. What I have discovered, though, is if you turn the ringer off, the phone still doesn’t, you know, ring, regardless of who’s trying to reach you.
Maybe Florida State University’s decision to throw me out of graduate school wasn’t as unjust as I’d like to think.
My heart skipped a beat, stopped entirely I think, when I saw that my father had called, three times, minutes apart. Clearly something was wrong — perhaps significantly.
I was right.
One voice message:
“Hi, Ba, I need soap. This is Dad. I’m out of soap. You know what I mean? The soap. It’s the soap for the hands and washing purposes, so next time you come over, would you bring a couple of bars of soap? No rush. But bring a couple of bars. Two bars, I don’t know. Maybe three or four. But soap. You know, the soap. For the bathroom.”