Stopped at a Traffic Life | roughy d 3

so this happened...

Before we get to the doctor there's this important scene that takes place at a stop light just north of Fort Collins. I'm looking at my mom and she's so very small. The big beanie of gauze on her head doesn't help, even though it adds about five inches. It sits on her, weighing her down. It's all of the surgeries and tumors and medicine wrapped around her head in one more attempt to close it all up for good.

I've always had great empathy for my mom. This guy once asked me tips for talking about money with kids. I guess he's a Buddhist and wanted to share some stories with his Buddhist circle. Normally, I'd get a little intimidated by such an audience, but I just dove in. He'd uncorked one of the biggest emotional triggers in my life. I told him about the time when I my mom dropped me off for school and I ran back to her car to ask for a dollar for bowling in PE. She didn't have it, and it killed me that I'd put her in that position; the position of feeling shitty. All of us were empathetic kids. We knew too much about our financial situation.

I still remember the day when Pete and I found all that money in the woods and told everybody about it. Our verbose enthusiasm gave the rightful owner notice that he needed to get it back, and it infuriated my father to the point of very seriously saying; "If you fucking ever fucking find a box of fucking money in the woods, don't say a fucking thing, just put it in the truck." And he was serious, and I'm so mad at myself that I didn't at least slip a twenty into my pocket. That's maybe what I should have told the Buddhist guy: if you ever find a box of fucking money in the woods....

And we did. We did find the money. And there were gold coins, too. But I'll get there. Probably on the heels of some other emotional issue that story will come out about the drug dealer, his cute daughters and a country kid who took a shower once a week.

But it's that kind of adventure that I'd forgotten as I sat at the stop light in Fort Collins. It's that kind of living—eschewing the nuances that add up to the important things we overlook--that would have me get clobbered by a little lady counting pills in the passenger seat.

I guess it was just the sheer number of brain surgeries that had me thinking that it was ok to lift her from the hospital. Surprisingly, though, she was doing pretty well for the short time she'd had to recover in the hospital. And there I was, under another Colorado blue sky, whining about needing to get more done. My mother, who'd spent a lot of her life around loud men (myself included) didn't always get a word in edgewise. She waited until I took pause to pass the slow cars ahead of us. It was going to be a hectic trip, as I needed to get her to another hospital, and quickly. She was not deterred by my erratic driving. She carefully closed the caps on her weeks worth of anti-seizure meds and spoke.

"Jared," she said calmly but with a huge hint of witty sarcasm, "I don't have a job. I don't have a husband or a love life, I'd like a job but can't work and I have to count on my son to take care of me."

"OH god, I'm sorry," I said, thinking I needed to counter her with comfort.

"No, Jared, but I'm fine," she emphasized with the car pulling around an old truck in a no passing zone. And then she sighed and smiled and closed her eyes.

But I'M fine. I heard that. Even though she also added a very sarcastic "woo-hoo.”

And then, before nodding off in the cloud of blankets I'd packed around her, she told me she always loved following our adventures. "Our" being her kids. I didn't even realize how important that would be to hear, especially as I rolled onto the interstate, using two cell phones and my working wife to find out who and how to get mom into another hospital.

there's more