I bet I was higher than any of you when 2004 arrived. You can go ahead and submit pictures, mpegs, mp3 files of keenings and ecstatic animal gruntings, but you'll still lose. I was at 35,000 feet, on my way from Seattle to Detroit for an unplanned visit to Toledo.
My mom had caught the flu while visiting one of my brothers over Christmas, and after returning home Tuesday was having trouble breathing. Wednesday morning, my brother in Atlanta called and told me she'd been taken to a hospital, put on a ventilator and was in an ICU in serious condition. He and I discussed the situation, called a couple of my parents' close friends still living, and still living in town, speculated about how Dad would react and how he'd be able to get back & forth to the hospital...it became clear that we were playing a little game of conversational chicken about, ultimately, which one of us would pack up and head to Toledo. I finally caved, having a more flexible schedule and a sizeable bank of Northwest Airlines miles, and made a reservation for the Wednesday night redeye to Detroit.
My plane pierced the 2004 veil somewhere over Montana. I slept little, if at all, and landed in Detroit at the ridiculous hour of 5 am, the beneficiaries of strong east-bound jet streams. I juiced up on espressos, called the hospital for visiting times and decided to stop in there before heading to my parents' house, since my Dad seldom rises before noon.
When I first espied my mom in the ICU, she looked just awful, hardly recognizable - asleep, white as a sheet, vent tube stuck down her throat. I started recalibrating my expectations about her chances. A nurse woke her up, and she was very startled to see me (a good sign). In a few seconds she realized she wasn't dead and stuck in some version of hell where she couldn't talk or cry for help and I was the only person at her bedside, and determined that...she was alive and nonetheless stuck in that version of hell.
Our "conversation" exposed just how thin my narrative powers are (you, gentle readers, already knew), since she couldn't talk or write and I had to extemporaneously fill the awkward silence with whatever non-parent-dying prattle that I could extract from my sleep-deprived brain. Now and then she would raise her hand and try to form letters in the air, which I had no hope of translating, and to get her to quit I'd launch into some further lame crap. My battery finally wore out and I told her I'd bring my dad back later, and left.
(this has a happy ending - I'll get to it!)
3:15:06 AM 
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Perils of Caffeine in the Evening
