The call is from David. He’s been in Korea with the Army for about a month. He asks if I was asleep. Truthfully I tell him I was just waking up. He’s got bad news: he has leukemia. “How are you doing?” he asks. “I feel calm,” I answer.
And, surprisingly, I do feel calm. I described to David an interview of Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, the moon shot mission that went terribly wrong two days into the mission and never landed on the moon. People would ask him whether the crew panicked when they realized the spaceship was severely damaged. Well, he said, we could have screamed and banged around the ship for five minutes, but then, when we stopped, we’d be in the same situation. So we skipped the panic.
David and I talk for a while. He’s being transferred to Walter Reed Military Medical Center; he’s not sure when he’ll arrive.
Jim and I have plane reservations to visit my sister Maggie in southern California; we’re scheduled to leave Saturday, March 22nd and stay until the 30th. It will be our West Coast tour, visiting Maggie and John in Fullerton, then flying to San Francisco to visit Ted and Kathy Perry. Jim’s never been to San Francisco; I drove through it in 1995, in a purple-tailgated mini-van full of kids, pulling the tent trailer. For the next three days we wait for the call and debate: should we go to California? On Thursday we decide to go; we might as well wait for the phone call in the southern Californian sunshine. But on Friday we get definite word: David will arrive at Dulles Airport on Wednesday, March 26th. So we cancel our flights for the next day. The airline, United allows us a year to use the credit, minus a $200 change fee. The next time we flew it was cheaper to fly Southwest than redeem the credit.
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