My son Isaac and I were playing Scrabble at our dining room table one recent evening when the phone rang. As always, Isaac ran to answer it. He heard his sixteen-year-old sister’s voice on the other end of the line. She was calling from her father’s house in St. Paul. When he heard that she wanted to talk to me, like any thirteen-year-old little brother, he made her wait.
“What do you want to talk to mom for?”
“Give her the phone, Isaac! I have to talk to her now!”
I was sitting across the table, silent yet hearing everything, watching this scene go down. As always, I was conflicted. How far do I let them take the battle before I step in and pull rank? And how much longer will I be able to? It’s a nasty fact of parenting teenagers that as each day passes, your Dr. Spock death grip loosens. Edicts become suggestions, proclamations become proposals.
I came out of my misty reverie to realize that a couple of minutes had passed and Isaac was still holding the receiver tight to his ear. He had launched into tactical taunting, repeating everything his sister said in a creepy, quiet, old-lady voice.
The louder she got, the quieter his whispering became.
“ISAAC! Give mom the phone NOW!”
“Isaac, give mom the phone now … hehehe.”
“ISAAC!”
“Eye-zz … ack … hehehe.”
I let this foolishness go on another minute until my daughter had resorted to yelling and my son had begun barking in response to her, like a dog who’d mistakenly knocked the receiver off the hook. This brings new meaning to family game night, yes?
I wrested the phone from the boy, who dissolved into giggles, then dug his hand into the letter sack for more tiles. My daughter was frantic. Her dad is a cabinetmaker with a home workshop and something had gone very wrong.
One of the most horrible aspects of horrible accidents is that you never know just when they are about to be rained down upon you, or someone you love. The overwhelming sense of bewilderment mixes with fear and pain, and the surprise factor shakes it all up like a fizzy panic cocktail.
“Honey—what’s going on?”
“Mom there’s been an accident and Dad cut his hand bad in the table saw and we’re at the emergency room and I don’t know but I think he lost a finger or two and he drove to the hospital with his hurt hand wrapped in a towel and I’m worried about him and they’ve got him back there now but I saw a lot of blood!”
She calmed down long enough to answer the where, what, and how questions accurately. After we devised a plan of action, I debriefed Isaac, who was mortified at his phone antics in light of this new information. I assured him that with his heartfelt apology, his sister would forgive him.
Then I used his remorse as a teaching moment to stress the importance of telephone etiquette.
Then I used his remorse to get him to take out the garbage.
With nothing to do but wait for the next phone call from the emergency room, we sat at the table and continued our game in thoughtful quiet. Isaac, no doubt reflecting on the disturbing events of the evening. Me, contemplating the absurd notion of control.
In a sober tone, Isaac broke the silence. “Hey mom, you don’t think Steve lost his thumb, do you?”
“Gosh, hon, I don’t know. I hope not. That would be awful.”
Isaac’s brow furrowed as he looked at me across the game board and said, in all seriousness, “Yeah. Because you know, that’s the only thing that separates us from the animals.”
Maybe it was suppressed hysteria breaking through, but I howled with laughter. Still, it did get me thinking later that night, on my way to the hospital, about what does separate us from the animals.
I’d like to say that it’s passion, but anyone who’s seen a dog dig after a bone knows better. And it can’t be art, because if you’ve ever witnessed the lace of a spider web in the morning sunlight, you know there’s way too much incidental beauty on this Earth for us to take special credit for what we create. It can’t be politics, because lions have prides, and hives have monarchies.
And so it must be power tools.
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