Priorities--Families always in a crisis

I have a strange sense of priorities, I know.  I come back from a trip and don't unpack.  I go straight to the computer and upload the photos and start writing about the experience before it occurs to me that I should let people know that "I've arrived safely."  In the case of Atlanta, I wrote a thank you note immediately.  That wasn't out of a sense of etiquette but a sense of urgency:  What I really felt like doing.

There's a new novel out, How Should a Person Live? and it reminds me of Virginia Woolf's question about One Thing that Matters.  How do we know?  We don't. The only thing we have to guide us on how to live and what matters (besides doctrines) is our instinct.  So I no longer fight my own sometimes absurd-seeming sense of urgency.  I do what I feel like doing.  In the case of my cousin Nancy and her husband George, I felt like thanking them because they had been heroically kind and accommodating.  They had helped all us cousins feel loved.

And that brings me to my own family and our sense of urgency.  We actually have a lot of emergencies, a lot of them pertaining to my brother, so many of the communications between my sister and me and my son are about David.  I was impressed by the priorities of my meque Javier who had waited for 5 hours (in my home, not at the airport) for my delayed flight and yet immediately agreed to go with me to Alameda to see David, who was in the hospital when I returned.  So after we'd slept a little, we dropped our afternoon plans and headed for David's bedside.  That filled me with love for Javier.  But it also worried me.  For years my mother and I had almost no time one-to-one except for our trips to Napa to see David.  Our phone calls were also about David.  We were the team to go see David, and I'm glad we were.  But I'm not glad that that constituted our relationship for so many years.  So I worry when I see that concerns and shared information about David constitute almost all the exchanges between my sister, Jonathan and me.  (This is not true of exchanges between Jonathan and me, fortunately, but I'll get to that later.)

Today, after several exchanges pertaining to David, I finally wrote to Suzy and David about our cousins in Atlanta and about a visit from a friend I've had since seventh grade.  But I wrote sort of asking permission.  Could I tell them about Atlanta?  I explained my hope that our shared communications be about more than taking care of David. 

I thought of my nephew who just got back from Kenya, where his medical school sent him.  I didn't even know he was there until my sister called me about another matter, the resurgence of a baby she hadn't seen since he was born.  I hope to see this nephew this week, and when I do, I'm glad I won't have to ask his help with anything.  I'll be able to ask him about HIS life and, maybe, share my life with him.

As for my son Jonathan, we have that built-in Jo-Mama Book Club that meets once a month and we do talk about other things in between.  But if I ever call him (I hate the telephone), it's about some airlines reservation I need to make or a computer glitch.  He interjected into a three-way-e-message that he was on his way to Montreal.  When I responded to the David-care part of the Suzy-Jonathan-Tina exchange, I also responded to the trip to Montreal, but when I called him about the volume being off for all online soundtracks on my computer, he became my kind, smart tech help.  It was only hours later that I remembered his trip to Montreal and asked him--in an e-mail--about it. 

I know that Suzy has ongoing needs with her new house.  But I wonder how much attention our nephew got to HIS life when he visited her.  Maybe they really did talk about him and his trip to Kenya, him and his newly-found half-brother.  But all I know is that they took a trip to Home Depot for her house and visited David together. 

Our family always seems to be in a crisis.  Today my urgent calling was to respond to Jonathan's e-description of his trip to Monterey and to tell him and Suzy about our cousins in Atlanta, so I did.