The Call

I got the call on a Tuesday night, some time before 6 o’clock. I was a seventeen-year-old boy in khakis and blue shirt with a necktie partially tied around my neck getting ready for vespers, the evening assembly at my boarding school before dinner. 

“Bristol,” a classmate said leaning into our dorm room, “there’s a call for you.” 

I thought little of it, but it ended up being a call that has echoed in my soul for forty-four years. My mother was at the other end of the line. She said my name but couldn’t say anything else at first. There were other words sputtered: Willie . . . hit . . . died . . .  are the three I can still hear. She called to tell me that my dog, Willie, had been hit by the newspaper delivery truck and was dead. The moment froze in time. I can still remember the smell of the cleaner used on the linoleum hallway, the sound of the other students’ loafers and their adolescent banter echoing off the plaster walls, and the feel of the payphone receiver.

This was my first call, but there have been others since. I’ve heard friends tell me about their calls, and while the details are unique, the import and life-changing nature of such calls are always the same. 

Each person remembers where they were, who called, and one or two of the words that floated through the phone line like ash. Are you sitting down . . . there’s been an accident . . . I have bad news . . . your test results have come in. The list is as varied as it is endless.   

Each time someone shares about their call, it brings me back to mine. My wife says hers made her see the world and those in it as fragile. Mine made me see the world as unsafe. Either way, such calls change the way we see the world, forever. A wound is caused that never fully heals. 

My call made me want to hide and never let the world’s fickle pain ever reach me again, but it did. I tried to coil my arms around me, like a hug, to keep me warm, but life’s bitter breeze continued to blow.

My call made me wonder about life after death in a way I never had before. It made me appreciate, maybe even cherish, those people, places, and things I’d taken for granted. Their value was found in loss. 

In some twisted way, maybe the calls themselves are gifts, but I’m not there yet.