Cut to the chase: He's ok.
When I got there all seemed normal.
Ed was asleep in his room, as is usually the case.
I was slow on the uptake. I had had an exciting day already.
The two mourning dove eggs that were laid on my windowsill
ia month before had taken flight that morning. (Incidentally if you wonder why I wasn't posting here all that time, it was because I was continually videoing the chicks growing up.) If you watch THIS VIDEO WHEN DOVES FLY turn sound on so you can hear me gasp when the
first one didn't make it to the roof quite—guided to a sill across the
courtyard by the papa—but mainly to hear my upstairs neighbor leaning out the
window narrating and thinking I wasn't awake yet!
Anyway, I became alarmed when Ed wasn't waking up for supper as usual. He seemed too sacked out. And then I felt his forehead, and it seemed warm. He was flushed too. So I rang the button around his neck and asked for a nurse to come. And I called Ed's daughter, who was in town. And I dithered. The nurse said he had 100.4 and wanted to call the EMTs and take him to the ER. Ed's daughter said yes.
The EMTs got Ed's son on the phone, and I had his daughter on the phone and I was taking pictures. Ed was alert enough to tell them his birth date.
"You're not allowed to take pictures here," one of the EMTs said.
"I'm a journalist, and he's a journalist, and I will be taking pictures," I said.
"You want me to call the cops?"
I shrugged.
I stuck his phone in his pocket, and off he went. His daughter met him at the hospital. So off he went into the sunset. They tested him for Covid, which he had had once before, and voila. His lungs were clear, and it seemed a mild case, so they sent him back to "the hotel," as he calls his place, with Paxlovid and instructions to quarantine.
And I want home under an almost full Easter/Passover/Pagan Spring moon to my empty nest.
