My dad has never done anything half way. He truly is a force of nature. He is not fiery exactly, not earthy, certainly not airy. His energy is purely electrical. He looks and acts remarkably younger than his 74 years. True to his nature, he has been an electrical contractor for almost his entire life, before which he worked a slew of other jobs, from stock boy to delivery boy. He has worked steadily since he was young, and he has prayed since then too. Even as a child he would wake up in the dark to trudge miles to Mass every morning before breakfast and before school, like a good Irish Catholic son.

I suppose it should seem fitting then, in a sense, that tests have revealed that my father is potentially at high risk for ventricular fibrillation, which causes cardiac arrest – also known as sudden cardiac death. Cardiac arrest, I’ve learned, is different from a heart attack, which occurs when a blockage of blood vessels interrupts the flow of oxygen rich blood to the heart, causing the muscles to die; a plumbing problem of the heart, if you will. Ventricular fibrillation, on the other hand, is an electrical problem, where the signals controlling the heart become rapid and chaotic, causing the ventricles to fibrillate instead of contract so the heart can no longer push blood to the rest of the body. Death usually ensues within minutes.

The news has sent our family into its own fibrillation. My sister Christina, my mother and I have all become nervous and jittery with chaotic emotions jumping from one extreme to another. Feelings switch on, then off again, unpredictably. My eye has started twitching. It feels like we are waiting for a clear signal.

Tomorrow morning, my father will undergo a procedure called an eletrophysiology of the heart. The way I understand it, specialists will actually try to instigate, through the use of tiny electrical impulses, the potentially dangerous arrhythmias they are hoping to halt. Electrode tipped catheters pushed through his veins will detect his heart’s electrical activity and help map the area where the arrhythmia is occurring. If necessary, they will implant a defibrillator.

And when they are doing this, while I try to forge through the ordinary routine of a Wednesday morning – getting Jack and Liam up and ready for school, I will do what my father would do if it were one of us. I will pray for him, mapping and navigating my love for him through an electrophysiology of the terrain of my own beating heart.

My Boots

My boots are going to the inauguration tomorrow. Unfortunately, I will not be joining them. They will accompany my photographer friend, Dorie, who did not deem her rubber toed duck boots fashionable enough for Washington, DC. So, my mud splattered size 5 1/2 brown leather, lugged sole, sheepskin lined Uggs will be there celebrating without me, presumably splashing through slush on their way to the capitol to hear Barack Obama make his inaugural address to our nation, keeping Dorie’s feet warm while she snaps photos documenting this historic occasion. And while part of me is glad to watch tomorrow’s events from the comfort of my warm home, my heart and sole (forgive me) will most certainly be in DC tomorrow.

In the meantime, I am still trying to digest the Miracle on the Hudson, the unexpected precursor to this inaugural week, which seemed to hold a heavy deal of symbolic weight for a nation suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder. My sister flew out of New York that same Thursday. I was driving when I heard the news on the radio that a plane had landed in the Hudson. “Not Elena,” I thought as both a promise and a prayer until it registered that the plane had been bound for Charlotte, not Chicago. It reminded me of 9/11 when I listened to the news on the radio that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers, while driving to the middle school where I worked. While I did not begin to wrap my mind around the scope of that catastrophe, assuming that it was accident involving a prop plane, my brain began trying to locate my father, who worked then in different locations around the city. I called him from the principal’s office since I didn’t own a cell phone. He was safe at work somewhere in Queens. The news had, of course, gotten unimaginably worse in the short time it had taken me to reach him.

Just over a week ago, on a frigid and bright full moon night, we went to a dinner party at our neighbor’s home. There we met a lovely couple with a three year old son, and a twelve year old daughter who was sleeping over at a friend’s house. All of our boys played together while we chatted around the kitchen table before dinner. As we got lost in the thick of conversation, a glass of wine tipped, the redness quickly permeating the cream colored tablecloth to its edges, and I found myself physically pushed back against my seat with the sudden, shocking recognition that the warm and resilient woman across from me had lost her husband – her daughter’s father, and numerous friends on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, where she had also worked. She hadn’t gone in to her office that day. Her life and the life of her daughter spun around like a car in an accident for years afterwards at the mercy of fate and circumstance and unimaginable grief, until it seems they crashed in Taos. Her then five year old daughter was teased and bullied on the bus on her first day of school here. She met a wonderful man, had a beautiful son. There was the sense that both she and her daughter were only very recently coming back to consciousness.

The US Airways accident seemed to me to introduce the idea to our exhausted national psyche that even when things go miserably wrong, somehow, by a combination of luck, preparedness, fate, leadership, and teamwork, the outcome can potentially be miraculous. After seven years of stars apparently aligning to produce the worst possible outcomes of inherently disastrous situations, what a stunning and almost giddy relief it was to watch people stepping off those airplane wings floating steadily in the icy Hudson into the arms of those reaching out from ferries, as if they had been just sitting waiting there for that particular plane to fall out of the sky in that particular spot in the river at that particular moment.

“Daddy our plane turned into a boat,” said a four year old boy on flight # 1549 to his father after the plane landed in the Hudson.

And in that spirit, on this inaugural eve, my wish for the incoming administration is that when things go wrong – as they inevitably will, may they unfold in a way (whether by effort, brilliance, chance, or grace) that allows our children to retain their natural sense of wonder, their innocence, and most of all, their hope.