SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 78
RUNNER-UP — CREATIVE PROSE
Dean Gessie
on the telephone with mom
The first thing you need to know is that she [mostly] doesn’t answer the phone, anymore.
Even though her phone rings six times or for thirty seconds, my calls typically go to voicemail;
then, I hear her speak her name from at least twenty years ago. I call three or four times in
succession. That’s eighteen to twenty-four ringtones or one and a half to two minutes. Over
the course of one year, that’s about twelve hours of listening to ringtones. In the interim,
while I count, I listen to my wife playing with the dog downstairs. Dear mom, I think, won’t
you throw me a bone?
The next thing you need to know is that it is unclear why my mom [mostly] doesn’t
answer the phone. My wife and I have whittled down the possibilities to three. None of them
is necessarily exclusive: 1. Mom sleeps profoundly and she sleeps most of the time [as a result,
I suspect, of a cocktail of drugs to treat a panoply of co-morbidities]; 2. mom’s cognitive
decline is severe [she complains routinely that the telephone is a kind of sphinx, a treacherous
and merciless being]; and 3. mom has egregious physical challenges: she is largely blind and
can’t actually see the telephone at her bedside; also, her hearing is poor [in fact, when I do
connect, I speak as might a weather reporter in a hurricane]; and, lest we forget, mom’s
arthritic fingers are like tree roots; handling the telephone requires the skill set of a surgeon.
Dear mom, forgive me for thinking sometimes that you’re not making the effort, that your
son has been ghosted in favour of eating, toilet breaks and sleeping.
Further to paragraph one, my hours of purgatory on the telephone sometimes expose
me as an imposter or sinner who probably deserves the kind of purification you get in an
airport waiting room. When I have not spoken to my mom for a few days, I am anxious to
hear her voice and to talk to her. I love my mom. I want to hear from the horse’s mouth [so to
speak] that she is alive and relatively well. Conversely, there are evenings when I am somewhat
selfish and somewhat grateful if she does not answer. I can proceed quickly to the evening’s
itinerary: train my dog with her favourite treats; walk the dog and see to her needs; and watch
a show on Netflix with my wife. Dear mom, forgive me my theatrical moments of false virtue;
forgive me for calling you sometimes with the unexpressed intent to not talk to you.
Further to paragraph two, there is a fourth possible reason that my mom doesn’t answer
the phone: she doesn’t want to. Indeed, she has let it slip that she may not feel well enough on
any given day to navigate the chore of talking to me. In fact, she has admitted to answering
the phone at the time of my third or fourth call so I would not be disappointed. This was
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