Some ten years ago, we got a phone call from down south. 

There were a few questions about the health of the Patriarch in my good wife’s family.  They were currently living in Truman Arkansas. 

What concerned them, they said, was that Dad was a little off.  His normal energy was lacking a bit; his regular sharp mind wasn’t always on point.

We decided to give it a couple of days and then see.  A couple of days turned out to be too much time to give it. 

On the morning of the third day, Dad was in the OR, and we were heading our pea green Dodge Caravan east towards Springfield, then southeast through the torturous curves heading into Mammoth falls, before dropping down into West Plains, and finally coasting to a stop in the Jonesboro parking lot of St Bernard’s hospital a little after midnight. 

Brother-in-law Galen and I went down the hall to see what we could see.  At an intersection with another hall we heard, “Clear the way, coming through,” and stepped back just in time to see our Dad being rolled away from the many hours he had just spent in the OR. 

The night nurses said they needed a little time to get Dad ready for us as a family to visit him.  We later found out that they didn’t expect him to make the night and didn’t want all the stress on us until the last minute.  I’m no medical professional, but I do know that he looked more dead than alive when we caught that glimpse of him as he rolled through. 

And he did die.  A couple of times.  The stress of the long surgery and the high infection rate in his blood from a staff infection he had picked up through a scratch wound while grinding tree stumps was too much for even his sturdy constitution.  But the One Who Knows had mercy on us and, working through the skilled efforts of the doctors and nurses brought him back to us.

The next few days were very much touch and go.  His journey to recovery had him in the hospital for 4 weeks and another 3 at an inhouse therapy location. 

Somewhere during that time, the Doctor told us that we could expect Dad to make a good recovery and go on to live a normal life.

Being somewhat naïve when it came to Doctor language, I took the Doc at his word. 

I became frustrated with the Doctor’s words as time moved along.

It was only some years later, almost ten in fact, that I think I began to understand the meaning of those words spoken back there in that hospital room.

I think what that Doctor meant was, in whatever way a person recovers, then at that stage of the game he/she begins a new phase of normal life.

Say you blew your knee out and had two surgeries to get back to walking.  Whenever someone professional would look at your case, they would review how far you had come, what your mobility currently was, and even though that mobility didn’t allow you to run much, if at all, said professional would say, “Yes, you are functioning normally for having had two surgeries.”

Normal, in such a case, seems arbitrary.

In our human way of thinking, we’d like normal to go on and build upon itself.

We’d like life to return to the original status quo once all the drama had been enacted and lived through.

But I believe that Doctor held out some wisdom to us that day. 

We humans don’t go through the molting process like some animals do.  Neither do we metamorphosize like some other animals. 

No.  We start out in what, for hopefully many of us, is a steady projection of growth and good things.

We are so sure of what we call the predictability of normalcy that we even go to the extra length of charting our progress on graphs.

May I hazard a question? 

If our projection of normalcy were lived out perfectly, would we be the better because of it?

I look at the animal kingdom.  I see those that molt or metamorphosize.  In each one, I see a new, and in some cases, a completely different creature.

So far, I have never seen one of those creatures go back to the original they once were. 

I don’t see snakes trying to crawl back into their old, worn-out skin. 

Neither do I see those beautiful butterflies folding up their wonderful wings and squirming back into the worm body they used to call normal.

Rather, they move on to the next phase, and more than that, they embrace it, if you will.

Methinks it was some of that philosophy that the good Doc was holding out to us back there in Jonesboro.

I look at the scar on my right collarbone and feel the plate of metal just beneath it.  I probably don’t like so well the way the scar looks, but by now it’s a part of me.  It reminds me of who I have become since then; it’s a mere point in the journey, not the end result.

I think back to that stage when our children were just the right size to sit on my lap, their head tucked in perfectly under my chin.  I look back and say that normal could have lasted a long time to my way of thinking.  But if it had lasted, then we still would be waiting to take the quick, last-minute trip to Wichita that we took Saturday with both our boys and their beautiful wives for an Indian meal. 

And why do you think we all crave Indian food? 

Likely a normal somewhere was shattered.

I look back to this last summer and all the fun times my comrade daughter and I had.  That normal still tugs a fair bit.  I see how happy she is over there in New York, and I realize I never would have learned to know the fine girls/young ladies she is teaching.  Nor would I have learned to know their folks and the couple she stays with if that summer normal would have lasted.  

I guess, in the end, it’s better that we humans take on new normals.  It isn’t always easy, and the end may not always be clear.  Travel on a few years, though, and it becomes the new normal.

In a way, moving on to a new normal begins the natural shedding process of things not meant to be carried any longer.

Probably a fellow with the last name of Browning put it about right—

‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’