What the Signs Are Telling You
I was driving in the same car as an ex-girlfriend for the first time, and she saw her best friend on the street. She crouched down in the passenger seat and hid. I should’ve taken that as a neon sign with lasers, but instead I accepted the non-fact that her friend was a long talker and would have stopped us and talked for hours. Sure. Sometimes when you look back, you can’t fathom how many pairs of sunglasses you were wearing to miss the bright lights telling you the truth.
When my grandmother had to come stay with me when I was ten because my mom was getting a cyst removed from her breast, I was too young to investigate and took it at face value. I didn’t even know what a cyst was and definitely did not want to talk about breasts with my mom. She was really getting a double mastectomy. Next year, when my friend told me that his mom told him that my mom had cancer, I figured he was mistaken. I didn’t know much about what cancer was anyway.
When my dad stopped being the friendliest guy on Earth in the hospital, I just thought he was tired of accumulating water in his belly because of his bad liver. In retrospect, I think he finally realized there wasn’t a way out of the road ahead of him. He ended up getting a liver transplant and crushing it for six months, feeling and looking like his old self. I wasn’t close enough to see the quick decline. The dead end that he saw before was closer than it appeared in his mirror.
My grandmother had to use a magnifying glass to see things as she got older. For some reason, I didn’t put that together with her ability to drive a car and see well while doing it. She ended up getting into a car accident that she never really recovered from. I’m sure the lung cancer didn’t help. I crashed my car the night before I left for her funeral. I wasn’t sick, and I could see fine.
I got talked into getting gum surgery once. It was supposed to happen in three parts. After the first part, I didn’t go to the dentist for eight years because it went so badly. Imagine setting fire to your gums and then pouring vinegar on them and leaving them raw for two weeks. The dental surgeon who recommended the procedure hadn’t done that many of them. Bright lights in my eyes.
© Jonathan Greene, September 8, 2026
