there’s no place like home.

I was home in May for my dad’s heart surgery.  It was tense, but we all did a good job of still enjoying each other’s company.  While my dad was in surgery, my brother and I got lost on our way to the hospital.  We arrived to find my mom in the waiting room, holding the kind of buzzer that indicates when your table is ready at Outback Steakhouse.  Except when this buzzed, vibrated and lit up, it was time for news from the doctor.  We approached the desk, and were told, “The doctor will call you.” as the woman pointed at a white rotary phone on the wall.  In that moment, there was there a breath of abject panic.  A moment where we all wondered simultaneously if this was it, the end, the last moment of our lives as we knew them.  Shane held my hand.  A heartbeat later the doctor was telling my mom that everything was fine, and we should go have lunch.  Probably at Outback.

In retrospect, I should have been relieved when the nurse sent us to the phone.  There were a few private rooms where doctors met with families in person – much more ominous.  But at the time, it all seemed so clinical and anonymous, where you could get the worst news of your life in front of a hundred other people waiting for their turn at the same fate.

Being home now is wonderful.  It’s all fun.  My dad is going to golf in Myrtle Beach for a week.  Shane has two new cats of indeterminate gender who think they’re tigers in a circus.  As always, the house towers with books and bedclothes and holds a treasure trove of artifacts from my childhood.  My old bedroom is a time capsule, complete with *N Sync posters and high school letters on the wall.  My mom takes me to lunch at the deli and I see the parents of my friends who now live far and wide.  They make broccoli soup because it’s always been my favorite. My luggage got lost on the way here, but no one cares if I rock sweatpants around town.  People ring the doorbell for rooms, but we’re full (because I took that last room upstairs).  My mom makes pancakes for breakfast and buys Friehoffer cookies that don’t last a day.

One of the cats (Osiris? Icarus? I don’t know.) is asleep in my lap, having worn itself out trying to step on every letter that I type.  My mom bought me a library of Suze Orman books at a yard sale.  My dad read the “Twilight” books and is on to “The Sword of Truth” because I keep sending them here.  It’s my life-long collection of things, things that I would never keep myself because I can count on home to always have them around.