Ring, ring, ring....

I guess there's really no ringing to a telephone anymore, but you get the idea of the noise I was abruptly awakened to this morning at 1:38 a.m. It's been a rare occasion lately that I've gotten phone calls in the middle of the night, so I stumbled around knocking things around trying to find the cause of all that gosh awful racket.

A quick look at the phone told me it was my son calling from his cell phone. That can’t be good, getting a call from him at this hour of the morning, but I managed to shake a few of the cobwebs loose long enough to hear why he was calling.

Apparently someone had dialed his cell phone or house phone, I’m not sure which, (remember those cobwebs are still dangling) and before he could answer it they had hung up without leaving a message. He was very concerned because the call was a number from a local to our area hospital. Now my son and his family relocated to the cold gloomy north a little more than a year ago, so for him to get a call from a hospital in our area was of great concern to him. He had called the number and found it was a general number in the hospital and nothing that could be traced back to a specific person.

The first thing he said was, “Are you guys alright?” I assured him we were, but he asked again, “You guys are alright?” I think he even had to ask once again to reassure himself or to make sure I was really awake enough to confirm it. That we were indeed alright.

The first thing that popped into my mind at that point was that maybe it was someone trying to get in touch with him about his father-in-law. His mother-in-law was still with them after returning the baby grandson. My son was going to call to make sure he was alright. I told him to call me back and let me know if things were OK with him. He left me with more common sense than I had at that point. “I’ll call you if there’s a problem, otherwise, if you don’t hear from me you’ll know he’s fine.” That makes sense. I guess he had been awake a little longer than I had at this point.

By now I was completely awake. But I didn’t mind being awakened at that time of the morning since it was him, and everything was well with them.

There was a little bit of sweet revenge now that everything obviously turned out alright from both ends. He finally probably “gets it”. As a younger man he could never understand why in the world I could possibly need to stay up until he got home from a date. (This was many years before cell phones took over our lives.) He knew exactly where he was and that he was just fine. He was not lying in a ditch with a car dangling on top of him. That was always my biggest fear! And a guilt trip I laid on him every date night. I'm sure Little Princesses' mommy also heard this constantly, too. Because it really was a horror of mine.

Now that he has three handsome little sons, I’m pretty sure this is just the beginning of many lessons he’ll learn over the years. Children have such a way of making us change our minds about a lot of things.

It makes me feel good that he was concerned about us for a change. He’s matured quite a bit in the last fifteen years, but oh, how much more he’ll grow over the next 8-10.

He never did find out who made the call. Apparently it was just a misdialed number. That happens. I hope that whoever made the phone call wasn’t the bearer of bad news, and all is well in their life today, but you never know because people don’t usually make calls at that time of the morning from a hospital unless it’s serious.

Some good news… Little Analyzer won first place for his Scout den in his derby car race and number four in the overall competition for speed. He makes me proud. I’ll bet he appreciates every nick and cut, every drop of blood he sacrificed, at the expense of his new pocket knife. Way to go, Little Analyzer! I can’t wait to see those pictures.