Antiphonal

"The refrain is 'lawd lawd lawd'" the editors said on behalf of the poet.

It is evening. I'm thinking back over this snowy day, which began at 5:15 am. Out the window, Everest and K2 are taking their familiar shapes at either side of the driveway from all of our shoveling.

Our work trip to Boston aborted after a rallying of cold and flake wasted troops in the lobby of the admin building. A video conference scheduled instead of a suicide trek down the Pike. Better bad audio and jaundiced looking pixel people than eight employees in two cars dead and injured in a snowbound ditch somewhere outside of Worcester. The snow was coming down like a curtain. Campus was closed except for "essential personnel", and thankfully, the cafe concession people at the Newman Center were essential. But then that is run by the Catholic Church. My car spun out on turns just getting home.

But well before any of that, at home in the dark of morning, I had turned on the computer to check weather, roads, etc, and saw a Southwest plane had skidded off the runway at Chicago's Midway airport - a six-year-old dead . . . blind immediacy seized me.

Shaking off terror with logical denial, I looked up their flight number in a state of tunnel vision - no, not the same plane. So I called around trying to find them. They were home safe in bed. Their plane (Southwest, with a plane change at Midway) had been a half hour behind the one that met its demise. With Midway closed, and since airports throughout the midwest were in dire straits because of the snow, they turned around and came all the way back to Hartford for 1:00 am and then back home.

I held back from critique, from pointing out what sort of omen this was for her damned relocation scheme. A half hour from disaster should tell her something. She's superstitious. Does she get it?

I think of those other parents out there in grief. The refrain, for all those who suffer, is whatever you make it.

And then I remembered that the day had really started, not at 5:15 AM, but with me wide awake at midnight after a strange dream.

My children were in a large building with me. It was like a school of fantastic imaginings. Somewhere in the building was an unnamed threat, possibly deadly, lurking somewhere in the deserted wings, afoot in the attic, slithering up the drains and taking huge mishapen forms in the corner of one's eye before evaporating when confronted. Even in the dream I chalked this up to watching too many Harry Potter movies in recent weeks. It was late, so the boys went off on their own to sleep in a room. This felt not quite right to me. Eventually, I went looking for them. In my search I found an empty and darkened playroom - eerie. Then I began to worry. I found my oldest, D, talking with some parents and some older kids in a sort of lounge. "it's a school night isn't it?" Oh, yes replied a jovial black woman in the group with a bright and heartening voice and smile. I said we should go home and sleep in our own beds, make our own breakfast -home. D agreed. "Let's find your brother", I said, without the faintest idea where in this maze of hallways, galleries and rooms he was to be found. He's only six, said D.

I woke up after that - strangely motivated to get out of bed and go find my youngest. It took me a few moments to realize they must be on the plane to Denver nowwith their mother, perhaps getting ready to land. And the hairs went up on the back of my neck, as if the dream had been them contacting me, as if I had felt something. I lay awake for awhile, wondering if and how the phone would ring with devastating news. The lapsed Catholic in me lapsed back. I said a prayer for their well-being, and remembered the reassuring presence of the black woman in the dream.

Lawd, lawd, lawd
And he was six weeks a-fallin