About a year ago, my father and I began calling each other during the last few minutes of our separate morning commutes. This wasn’t something we actually agreed on. At first, our morning talks were merely for the purpose of addressing this or that practical matter—a phone bill, the expected arrival time at a family get-together— and then, it became something we both took a liking to.

A few days a week, we catch up as I’m hurrying along from the subway at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue to The Rockefeller University campus on 66th Street and York Avenue, and he is driving along Princess Road to the Lawrenceville offices of The Special Olympics New Jersey, where he is Director of Operations.

“Hello, this is Rich!” I hear him say. Cool and collected are not two words one would use to describe my father, but somewhere in him is at least the potential for calm. For instance, when he’s clipping coupons at the kitchen table. For instance, when he’s reduced to two legs on a mat sticking out from underneath the riding lawn mower in the garage, carefully adjusting this or that part. I have seen him vacuum the driveway in a state of what could pass for tranquility, no matter that the act in itself is more or less the mark of excessive, some might say neurotic, attention to detail. But mostly, he is just his normal, high-strung self.

“It’s me,” I say into the phone, feeling as if I sound like I’ve just come out from under anesthesia by comparison.
“Good morning,” he says. Like a runner stretches before the race, and a singer tries a few bars before the show, I consider this to be my warm-up for the day’s conversations.

Most days, we comment on the weather. My father is really into weather. Lots of conversations between other people that involve weather take place because the participating parties find it easier to talk about than subjects that involve more effort, but my father actually seems to take pleasure in noting (out loud) the temperature climb a degree or two on the electronic thermometer inside his car as he descends from our house atop a little mountain down to the town below.

“I hope you wore your rain boots!” he might tell me. “Rain’s supposed to hit us around 6, but Manhattan will get it around 5:30 p.m. or so, right on your way home from work.”

Part of what’s nice about our morning calls is that it keeps us in the loop on each other’s daily affairs. Even though my father and stepmother live in New Jersey, not far from New York City, it’s a tedious journey for me to get out to see them without the use of a car, and my father fears the city the way an ant on a sidewalk runs from human feet. They rarely venture in to visit.

In September, I made the mistake of relaying the progress of yet another dispiriting apartment search, having developed a chronic dissatisfaction with every place I have ever lived. I should have known better than to make him worry about my grim housing prospects, which pretty much cured him of any growing desire he had to come sample my big city life.

“I saw a place this weekend,” I reported.
“And?” he inquired.
“Kind of a weird neighborhood,” I told him. “Some people are destined to live in the financial district or the diamond district, but it looks like I might be destined to live in the artificial limb district,” I sighed. I had a sense of humor about this. He didn’t.

Often, we discuss goings-on at work. One day, I struggled to focus on a story he was telling about a new color copier he’d ordered for the office; another day found him describing something about a flagpole part needing to be replaced. You thought flagpoles were simple— flag and pole, maybe some ropes or something secured with a pulley— but listening to my father describe his complicated flagpole conundrums (something stuck, something tangled, some sort of flagpole-fixing professional called to the scene) you would realize how mistaken you’d been.

The year after graduating from college, I had been working in the Development Office at Rockefeller for only a matter of months when I picked up the phone at my desk and heard my father’s voice on the other end of the line. This was before we had begun to have our morning phone chats, so I was somewhat surprised to hear from him.

“Just wanted to fill you in,” he said when I answered. “I had a bit of a rough night.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I’m at the hospital,” he explained. “But I’m fine,” he added, quickly. He sounded way too calm, almost as if he were forcing it for my benefit. It sounds cliché and unsurprising to say that my eyes filled with tears just then, but the truth is that they did, so fast I didn’t see them coming, and at the time I was surprised by it. I was alarmed by the wave of panic that swept over me the instant I heard his beaten down voice.

This is not the way these things are supposed to happen. Had we been playing by the rules, it would have been him, the parent, who got the call at work that something had happened to me, his child. Not the other way around.

The story I heard was this one: In the middle of the night, my father had suffered a massive seizure—a first in his life. As he flailed about, tangled among bed sheets in the dark room, he had broken both of his shoulders. My stepmother had dialed 911 and the next morning he was speaking to me, woozy and broken, from a hospital bed at Morristown Memorial Hospital, telling me he was “fine.”

“Should I come?” I asked.
“It’s up to you,” he said, “but really, I’m okay.”
The short version of what happened afterwards is that I decided not to go. Then I decided to go, then not to, then went. By a stroke of luck, my car was in the city and I took off for New Jersey as quickly as I could gather myself together.

That luck didn’t last. I had only been on the bridge for a minute or two when I felt the thud, that heavy noise that car bumpers make when they collide. You feel it in your chest. The man inside the truck in front of me emerged from the driver’s side door, pointing and yelling. Many times I have observed scenes like this one from afar. Man 1 stands screaming at Man 2, who screams back louder and with increasingly flamboyant gesturing. This was not something I could handle. All I could handle, I realized, was getting my father on the phone so that he could tell me what to do.

But this was not an option.
“Get out of the car and see if there’s damage,” his voice said in my head. I got out of the car. Ignoring the man, I assessed the damage, of which there appeared to be none. “There’s no damage?” the father in my head said. “Are you sure? Check again.” I checked again.

“There’s no damage,” I pointed out to the man, who was Hispanic and looked to be in his mid-sixties. He shook his head and spoke to me in broken English: “Not paying attention. Maybe damage inside, can’t see,” he said. I needed to talk my way out of this.

“Sir, I’m so sorry, but there doesn’t look like there’s any damage— please, let’s just forget it. I’m in the middle of a family emergency.” The man looked down and shook his head again, mumbling angrily in Spanish, but then he walked back to the door of his truck, waving a dismissive hand back at me before slamming the door.

“Boy, are you lucky,” said my father in my head.
My father was laid up in the hospital for over a week while he waited for his double shoulder replacement surgery. He was drugged on painkillers and frequently incomprehensible. He was depressed. When he wasn’t asleep, we fed him his meals, of which he ate very little and of which I ate a fair amount. (For the record, hospital food really gets a bad rap in cartoons.) We took him for walks up and down the hall. My stepmother accompanied him to the bathroom. The nurses took him to shower. He smelled anyway.

Most of us assume that a day will probably come when we’ll hold a fork full of food up to the puckered lips of our aged mothers and fathers. But we also assume that when this day comes, we will have long ago released them from our needy clutches. Faced with a flat tire, a broken heart, a root canal, we will hope that we will have already internalized their voices in our head when their real voices can’t be reached for comment.

That day on the bridge, as I sat back, clammy with sweat, in the seat of my car and the man in the truck ahead of me drove on, I realized I was still hovering at the edge of my father’s driveway. I wasn’t yet past the mailbox.

When we speak now on our morning phone calls, I appreciate the ordinariness of our conversation. I’d be lying if I said I make lasting mental notes of the guidance he gives me on all matters of daily tasks, but I like to think I am retaining more than I realize. Someday, if the need arises, I’ll be able to fix a flagpole.