I gave him a spoonful of the pink goo while cheerfully telling him this sounded to me a lot like the flu two friends had been down with for two weeks.
At midnight, he went to the emergency room at Kaiser and had his appendix out.
Next night Morgan, her friend Sara, Patrick, Bill and I piled into the car to the hospital to go see him. Morgan had brought him a card, and I, not terribly generously, had brought him his own newspapers from the front step. We had to wait in line to get past the Pinkerton man running security at Kaiser. He was quizzing a man ahead of us:
``What's your relationship to the patient?''
The man, nervous, ``I'm the father!''
``You're the patient's father?''
``No, I'm the baby's father.''
``Then you are the patient's husband?''
``No, she's my girlfriend.''
Then it was our turn. The Pinkerton man, uniformed, serious, held his pencil over the pad and said to Bill, ``And what's your relationship to the patient?''
Bill was stumped, you could tell. Are they sort of brothers-in-law? Instead of saying he was married to the patient's ex-wife, he said, over the laughing in our group, ``This is the mother of his children, and these are his children.''
SECURITY MEN HAVE trouble sorting out the kind of family we are, which is kind of '90s. Nineties families can be like my friend April, a Peninsula college teacher who adopted a 4-year-old Puerto Rican girl, Rosa Linda, and then took in the girl's mother, Nilda. April's friends didn't understand why she wasn't as available as she used to be. ``Well, you aren't really a family,'' one of them told her.
The American Heritage Dictionary at first seemed to agree, defining family as ``the union of man and woman through marriage and their offspring; one's spouse and children; persons related by blood or marriage.'' But then the dictionary adds that a family is ``any group of two or more whose emotional bonds are permanent.''
Some people are astonished that my ex-husband lives upstairs, as if it's hard to imagine having such a permanent bond with someone after you've been married to him. Such people find it hard to picture Jim coming down to find Patrick's math book, or to discuss the state of the roof, or me going upstairs to play pingpong with Patrick, or to talk to Jim about the kids' grades.
TRUE, IT'S ALWAYS, fleetingly, like stepping into my own past. Jim never changes anything. Most of the pictures on the walls are of the kids when they were younger than 5, because I put them there. My hats are in the closet, my photo albums on the living room shelves, my college texts in the attic, my old coats in boxes upstairs. Old friends from our marriage shoot the breeze over coffee at the kitchen table.
We knock, then barge right into each other's flats. As Robert Frost said, ``Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.'' Even Mike, our cat, yowls outside Jim's door when he wants to be let in downstairs.
We don't have a name for Jim's relationship to the cat. His ex-wife's husband's stepcat? But they get along just the same. It may even enrich the cat's life to have another part of the family up there. I know it does ours.
When I talked to her the other day, April said she'd sat in a park watching a Little League game, thinking about what she would fix for dinner that night besides rice. Rosa Linda was playing outfield, and Nilda was in the dugout, coaching. A father sitting on the bench near April said, ``Which one is yours?''
``Those two,'' April said, pointing them out. If she had to visit the hospital, April wouldn't have any trouble describing her relationship to the patient. ``She's my family.''
DAY: THURSDAY
DATE: 3/30/95
PAGE: FP
© 3/30/95 , San Francisco Chronicle, All Rights Reserved, All Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited