I look for things to come in threes. If a random event happens, it doesn’t bother me, but if two happen, I find myself looking for the third. Stories seem to be complete when there are three events, and experience has shown me that the third topic paragraph in my five-paragraph life essays comes when I wait.
The day after Xenia lost her eyesight and was taken to the ER, we had a big Sunday evening dinner planned. I wanted to have a birthday party for the girls, Sophia turning twenty-two and Esther twenty-four, but the following weekend, which was closer to their birthdays, I was going to be in Spokane and Sophia in Colorado. Our usual friends were all at a post-Pascha weekend party, so we invited Reader Ed, who sings in the choir, and my friend Deborah, who is a sweetheart and grandmother of many. They are always up for being spontaneous when we have a seat to fill at one of our dinners. The menu was Mike’s Vietnamese Caramel Chicken, which is a favorite of both the big girls.
While Mike was busy in the kitchen chopping up herbs and I was at the grocery store with Xenia buying some more shallots for Mike, the boys went at each other in the den.
Jonah walked into the den intending to watch some television. Justin playfully attacked him with his Nerf gun sword. Jonah looked around, grabbed Justin’s plastic katana, and used it to disarm Justin, who ran into his room angry. Justin saw a metal broom handle that had been pulled apart, down to a tube. The sweeping part was unscrewed as well as the plastic cap at the other end. He raced back out to the den and began dueling.
In the first round of their fight, Jonah deflected the broom handle. Then they reset to have another go, and this time Justin thrust the pole at Jonah and stabbed him in the hand. The metal cut a semicircular groove into his finger just above his knuckle.
It happened so fast he didn’t feel anything.
Justin was apologizing over and over again when Jonah looked down and said, “This isn’t good. Is that a bone? Oh no, no, it moves. That’s a tendon.”
Mike called and asked if I was on the way home. At first I thought he needed the shallots sooner than later, but no, he was calling to ask me to run to the ER.
Mike depends on me to make our dinners happen, but I had to abandon him. The ER was twice as busy as it was when Xenia and I were there the day before. Esther, John Ben, and Coryn all helped out as much as they could. They got the table set and the dishwashers emptied, but everyone forgot the rice.
They started the rice so late that dinner was postponed for another hour. That worked out well for Jonah and me though. After waiting forever to get Jonah’s four stitches and discharge papers, we arrived home in time to join everyone in singing the Resurrection Troparion and saying prayers to bless the food.
It was that night that I saw the pattern and began to wonder what would bring us to the ER for the third time.
I’ll write about the search for number three next.
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