Summer turns surreal, a phone call from my sister announcing that my dad is headed by ambulance for Jackson. Another summer, another emergency hospital stay. Multiple blockages in the small intestine this time. He's neither as critically ill nor as abusive this year, but I have to admit that I can't shake the emotional imprints of other times. I can hardly bear to stay in the room, especially when I'm alone. Once last week, I left for coffee, while he was asleep, and I realized, as I pushed open the door of room 813, that I felt within me my lifetime of doors opening to where my father is: I felt fear. Yet at other times, when his ankles hurt and he wants to sit on the side of the bed, I tell him to lean on my shoulder, I lay my head on top of his, and I am overwhelmed with tenderness for this old man, part hardwood, part fragile child.

In Daddy's room, the window is blocked out two-thirds of the way down but, where the glass is clear, the sun bursts through-- too strong to look at. Out there is basically the same view I sought when my dad was last here on the eighth floor, a view across rooftops to West Forest Avenue, to clinics and doctors of my past. I search through the trees for the upstairs apartment on Campbell St. where I lived for one autumn and winter long ago. I was pregnant with Christie but didn't know it. One day at the Memphis fair I'd felt woozy and needed to sit down on a curb , but I put that down to heat and corn dogs. I worked that fall until I was six months along, on my feet all day at the Sears catalog desk, lifting tires and boxes as big as I was. But when the management found out, they made me quit. So I tried to pass the time in that tiny apartment, so cute with its built-ins and slanted ceilings. I cleaned every inch of it every day and still had too much day left. Sometimes, I'd walk down to the park and feed the ducks. My mother has a photo of me there on the banks of the pond in my first maternity dress, so proud of the bump showing on my skinny frame.

I've lived in Jackson three times, during Christie's dad's odyssey for promotion. I know the city. But one morning last week as I drove from the bypass to the hospital, I turned on Hollywood instead of Forest and wound up nearly downtown before I turned around. I drove slowly past a lovely house that is for sale, saying to myself, "Sandy, you don't want to live here." My cloudiness is illness, but more.

As I ride the elevator to the eighth floor, the lullaby plays again, twice in a row. Twins, I guess. Or it could be just two unrelated babies, born at almost the same time. The hospital is bouncing with births; perhaps it's a full moon. Earler, I circled the parking lot, full at all times of the day, windscreens decorated with writing like wedding cars. :" Mom and Dad of Tyler," one says, and two rows over: " Grandpap of Tyler. " Once, the elevator door opens on the third floor, and the people outside the nursery window are four deep, like the crowd viewing the Mona Lisa. I hear someone say, "We look like a flock of vultures." As I walk down the eighth floor corridor, past two nursing stations, I think how the lullabies and the sun seem incongruous here, like noisemakers and purple mylar balloons at a seance.

It is on my mind as it has been before, the brief encounters of our lives. What do they mean? Does it make one whit of difference in the universe that I have happened into the photograph of a tourist from the Netherlands and that every time he looks at the Hermitage gardens, he will see me?

Is there any meaning that I have smiled at the musical announcement that a child has been born, a child I will likely never see? What about the young LPN in green scrubs who tries to adjust my father's IV and learns that it is leaking? Somehow, he has decided that she is Canadian, although if he just listened to her speaking, he should know better. But he's certain of it and is trying mightily to convince her that she should admire Anne Murray rather than Shania. "Daddy," I say, "She doesn't know Anne Murray. She's too young." She nods at that, and he tells her how it makes him feel when Anne Murray sings. I am delighted at this. And I am grateful to that girl who kneels beside the bed, so gentle, so patient with this conversation. I think of the ER doctors who, for four times now, have seen something in a glance and saved the life of an old man who should have been dead by all accounts and would have been had he continued to rely on whatever doctor comes to the local clinic one day a week. How much of life is about these relationships?

Long ago, I taught an essay that called such meetings "plug-in, plug-out" relationships and lamented that our lives were becoming nothing more than such easy encounters with hair stylists, store clerks, ministers at the back door of a church. I saw the point but doubt that many lives are so limited. Advice columnists seem to deal with the same questions about the same long-term meshings as ever. Sometimes, though, a "plug-in, plug-out" may more than we admit, more than we can possibly know. I don't know about total chaos theory, but sometimes I wonder if a shared smile may not rock distant stars.
posted by Sandy at 2:37 PM