Embracing the Day

To the novice observer, this past day, it might seem that Ian actually had a "bad" day.  His cough, which has been increasing over time, and for which Amy took him to the doctor last Friday, turned positively croupy this morning, and we kept him home from school.  This evening, I took him to the Urgent Care clinic, and they made him ingest some nasty liquids and inhale foul-tasting vapors from a plastic tube, one of which made his throat feel numb (by design, but he didn't like that), and made him feel like he couldn't breathe through his mouth, and really got him upset and feeling unwell.  Then they sent us off to the *real* emergency room, where we were stuck from about 8:30 until after midnight.  But these are all external considerations.

From Ian's perspective, aside from an admittedly awful cough, the day might look more like this:  He stayed home from school.  He spent endless quality time online.  When Madeleine came home, he and she set up parallel "work stations" on two different laptops, side by side, and he taught her how to play his video game, which absolutely enthralled her.  In fact, ahead of the bonding ritual, she put on pajamas - at 3:30 in the afternoon - so she could match her young hero and have a little pajama party inside while the rain thrashed out the window.  Then something very, very unusual happened:  I let him play video games on my cell phone. 

I don't normally let the young'uns entertain themselves with my cell phone, because I think they need to learn to do something other than poke at screens when we're out and about.  But because of his condition, I made an exception.  So he played video games on my cell phone en route to the hospital, and on the way back.  He even sat in the driveway, in the wee hours of the morning, playing a bit more "Tower Defense" before finally moving on to the mundane task of going inside and getting ready for bed. 

And so, as he was about to go to sleep, he gave me an impromptu report:  "Dad, I got a lot done today."  The repertoire that followed, of course, pertained entirely to video games.  But the important thing is, he got a lot done.

Then there's my own slice of relativity to think about in terms of evaluating the day.  For me, it was a highly intense day.  I took a half-day of personal time to go pick up the other young'uns, who had early dismissal, and take them home and get ready to bring Ian to Urgent Care.  From the moment we left the house, I was beside myself with anxiety around the idea that Ian might have a real medical problem - for example, he might need to be admitted to the hospital, which often introduces its own follow-up medical crises.  Our "night on the town" was very high-stress for me, on one level.

But then, there's another way of looking at things.  Ian and I went to Urgent Care, and the nurses were very nice to him, and unfeigned, I think, in their empathy.  We watched the beginning of "Night at the Museum," which I found wonderfully twisted.  Then we went to the hospital, where I spent the great bulk of our time, between sporadic, inconclusive apparitions from a doctor or nurse, flipping through the channels with Ian, watching snippets of all kinds of shows I've never seen before, like "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," and "That's So Raven," and a wonderfully hokey documentary on New Hampshire Public Television about the role of glass in transforming technology and society, from the Renaissance through the age of Fiber Optic.  When I wasn't flipping channels, with Ian's active guidance (he couldn't reach the TV, but he did a good job of communicating his programming preferences), I was listening to him tell me comprehensively detailed factoids about his video games, Percy Jackson, and other things that occupy his colorful inner life.  He imparted all these nuggets with a heart-melting hoarse little voice, interspersed with volcanic coughs, and always enveloped in his smiling, pure-hearted enthusiasm for the subject-matter at hand.

When the hospital visit was over, he was hungry, so we went to the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, where I picked him up his meal of choice, to go:  chili fries, the quintessential 24-hour-diner delicacy.  On the way, we had an adventure.  I couldn't remember on which side street the Red Arrow was located - it's not a very imposing little structure, even with its neon lights in the middle of the night - so I ended up driving up and down several streets off of the main drag, Elm Street, looking for it.  Along the way, I noticed a tall, head-shaved man, about 40, lying on the edge of an empty parking lot.  I screeched over to the side of the road and asked if he needed help.  He said that he was on the phone with Emergency - he was talking into a cell phone lying by his head, but I suspected that this phone call, if real, could still be of limited value.  It turned out that he didn't even know which street he was on.  I called 911 and reported the situation, answering the lady's questions - is he bleeding, is he talking, etc. - until I could alert an approaching police car, with my own arm-choreography, to the location of the prostrate man.

At the end of this unexpected course of events, Ian expressed some astonishment, or perhaps a touch of shock or trauma, at what had just happened.  I explained to him that I'm a city boy - Boston is much more action-packed than Manchester, after all - and that for city people, this kind of thing is never a big surprise.  Suddenly, Ian understood the back-story to my inclination to lock our doors at night, even though we live in a "nice" town; you can never take the city out of the city-boy.  But when we got to the Arrow Diner, Ian got the full picture of City - it's not just men lying down in a parking lot on a drizzly October night; it's also red-neon diners that light up the night and serve chili-fries to hungry Emergency Room alumni at 1:00 a.m.

Ian had an interesting perspective on this last episode.  I pointed out to him that you have a father and son, looking for food in the middle of the night on the way back from the emergency room, and somehow they find a man lying on the street that needs help getting help.  I pointed out that God can take these rather disparate stories and fold them together in a fruitful way, by His own designs.  But Ian pointed out another layer of detail:  it was only because Ian had used up my phone battery that we even went down that side street.  If my phone were charged, I would have relied on the maps "app" to find the diner for me, and we never would have gone down the street where that man was lying.  Ian recurrently surprises me with this kind of insight.

As far as good days and bad days go, I have my own perspective.  There's an old bumper sticker you still see on those time-honored Oldsmobiles on the highway:  "I'll take a 'bad' day fishing over a 'good' day at the office."  I have my own way angle on "the days of our lives," now that I'm a father:  I'll take a  'bad' day with Ian over a 'good' day fishing.  Because even the Emergency Room is an oasis of joy and useless-facts-about-video-games and freckly smiles, when you're with that lad.

(October 22, 2014)