Dinner for Two: Mom & Me

The streets of Indianapolis know me. I’m not sure I still know them.

I was driving my mother to dinner, early, just after five o’clock, and somewhere along those familiar roads a wave of anxiety came over me that I couldn’t explain. Nothing had happened. She was fine in the seat beside me. Better than fine. And still something rose up in my chest, some old and unnamed thing, as we passed the corners and intersections of a city where I spent the years that decided the rest of my life.

I was a girl here once. At the end of college, at the very beginning of everything, standing in this city with no idea what I would do or who I would become. That girl felt very close tonight and very far away. I have lived a whole life she couldn’t have imagined. And there I was, driving her mother to a steakhouse, unable to tell you why there was a weighty kind of agony looming.

I should tell you that the day before was a tough one.

I flew across the country to be near my beautiful mother and walked into her house to find her struggling. Extremely disoriented. Rapid breathing. Very low blood pressure. It was frightening. My brother and I called an ambulance.