Between Tears and Laughter

I’ve been tugged back and forth between tears and laughter today.

As I drove the boys to school this morning we saw an ambulance’s flashing lights ahead. We slowed and craned our necks to see paramedics on the side of the road crouched over a fifty-something man, compressing his chest, pumping oxygen into his lungs.

“That’s bad.” I said to the boys.
“Why do they have a mask on his face?” Owen asked
“He can’t breathe. He’s in big trouble. The mask will help him.”

As the man’s life slipped away, Owen, Roman, Errol and I drove on to school. By the time we hit the parking lot the boys were smiling and cracking jokes. “They were making his stomach fat!” “They were trying to blow him up!” They howled. I tried not to listen to their merry voices.

I dropped the big boys, and then Errol at his school and headed on to mine. By now the man was either dead or in the hospital. The boys had long forgotten him. I noticed an odd car behind me, a Nissan Cube. The more I looked at the aptly named car, the more I realized that the couple in the front seat bore a strong resemblance to their car. (Did they feel an anthropomorphic attachment to this car? Did the dealer laugh as the cubes drove their cube off the lot?) The driver and passenger were, in fact, human cubes: short, squat, thick-necked, boxy, cubic, with flat heads. They were, in short, in the right car. Which made me worry. I drive a Honda CRV.

And then I started thinking about the man on the cold hard sidewalk, among strangers gasping for breath. I drove on. I had a class to teach.

Errol is sating at about 70 (90 is normal-ish). He’s not getting the oxygen we hoped his surgery would provide. He’s too blue, too groggy, too unchanged. We hoped for more oxygen, more Errol. We worry about him.

I got to work and walked past a memorial that sits out in front of my school. It reads “Former site of the James Gray High School” and looks like a grave marker, as if someone is buried below (James Gray? A misbehaving student? Hope?) It is not a happy thing to see on the way into a performing-arts school, but the kids sure do work hard.

We worry about sweet little, fragile Errol. Seeds of Love took away our medical debts (THANK YOU ALL! WE WILL ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL!) but it can’t take away our worry for Errol. And I don’t think anything ever will.