Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt Read Free Book Online Page B

phone conversations with Carl and John, with my brother Peter, with Pete Weissman, with my longtime friend and assistant, the artist Jane Freeman, and with my Stony Brook friend and colleague Bob Reeves help speed up the drive. I check in with Ginny, who checks in with me. I try to be alert to the dangers of driving as much as I do, though sometimes I drift. Whenever I feel drowsy, I pull over and nap for a few minutes, but that rarely happens. Shirley Kenny, the president of Stony Brook, having learned of my driving schedule, wrote a letter warning me not to let my mind wander on the roadways. Ten years ago, she and her husband, Bob, lost their thirty-seven-year-old son Joel to leukemia. Her letter recalling the practical consequences of grief arrived a week after I had run a red light—the first time I’d ever done that.
    I try to limit my stops to two: one at the first exit of the Turnpike, where I have a “tall” Starbucks coffee and a blueberry muffin; the other at Exit 11, to fill up. Where the Turnpike divides, I always take the lanes for cars and trucks, and not the ones for cars alone. Since I drive up on Sundays, there are few trucks and the traffic moves quickly. The lane-shift tricks of the trip have become routine. When at last I turn the corner of our street in Quogue, I am always surprised to see our house. I pull into the driveway. Entering, I turn on most of the lights.
     
    Carl calls me on his cell phone nearly every morning on his way to work. I call him later in the day, and I also speak with John. Carl and John talk with each other, and with Ginny. The family always spoke frequently before Amy died, but our conversations have increased since. We seem to be assuring ourselves of the others’ wellbeing. I have assumed the role of chief worrier, which is unlike me. Before, unless there had been a particular reason, I never worried about anything. Now the simplest casual event involving the family has me anxious. I worry when any of them takes a trip. I worry about Ginny driving in Bethesda. I worry when the children or grandchildren are down with a cold. I worry about John walking at night in New York. Ginny merely mentions a pain in her right knee. I worry.
    At my urging, John arranged to have a CT angiogram, to determine that he did not have Amy’s anomaly. So did Carl. The chances were minimal that either of them was at risk, but should that have been the case, there are corrective measures cardiologists can take. Because he is our youngest and on his own, I worry about John generally, trying not to show it. The more I try, the more he is aware of it. He tolerates my fretting with good humor. I ask him if he wants me to go with him to the radiologist. “Only if you buy me a toy,” he says.
     
    Throughout the winter and the spring, there is hardly a moment for anything but play, caretaking, schooling, chauffeuring, and by 9:00 p.m., sleep. Jessie has soccer practice; Sammy has a party; Jess and Sammy have tennis; Sammy has a play-date; Jessie has Spanish; Bubbies has “gym” (an hour in which babies waddle around a large, highly polished floor, heedless of the commands of an “instructor,” and bump into one another); Jessie starts piano.
    When we were living in Washington, I wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post . One column, called “No Sleep-Overs,” was a father’s complaint about what was then the recent practice of overstuffing a child’s day with lessons and social life. I received more hate mail in response to that piece than to anything I wrote against capital punishment or in favor of gun control. Clearly, I was out of touch, as usual.
    These days, I am grateful for the children’s crammed schedules. Between December and June, Sammy and Jessie had birthdays, advancing to five and seven, and Bubbies went from fourteen months to twenty. His transformation seemed like one of those time-lapse tricks in movies. In April, we celebrated Amy’s birthday. When we blew out the