There are few things that sober you up quite as quickly and as completely as a trip to the emergency room to make sure your mother isn't having a heart attack.

There are few things that compare to spending six hours in the ER, watching your mom being hooked and plugged into tubes and wires, her every move being watched by the doctors and interns. She's been having these strange symptoms over the past few days, my mom: the neck and shoulder pains, the cold spells, the fevers, the sweats, the chest pains. Tonight the pains came on a bit stronger than usual.

"On a scale of one to ten," the attending resident had said, "how bad was the pain tonight?"

My mother rated it an eight.

It's a bit unnerving to look at your phone in the middle of dinner and drinks with your colleagues to see a hundred missed calls that something is amiss.

"Call me," Greg's recorded voice said into my ear. "We're taking her to the hospital."

I closed the tab and raced to the ER as fast as I could tonight, horrible thoughts racing through my foggy mind, the beer and vodka and rum and port swirling uneasily about in my stomach.

I sobered up pretty quick.

I sent Greg and my nephew Chris home at eleven and spent the next few hours making funny faces and talking to my mom about just about everything under the sun. I needed to make sure she was comfortable, I needed to make sure that she wasn't afraid, I needed to make sure that she knew that everything was going to be okay.

So I talked about the nurse, Cora. I talked about the doctors in their white coats and the residents in their green scrubs and the patients in their flimsy hospital gowns. "I bet you're the only Chinese Trinidadian at the hospital tonight," I said. I talked about a vacation. I talked about dinner last evening. I talked and talked and talked. And I made funny faces and made her laugh.

I'm going back to the hospital tomorrow morning to check on her and her prognosis.

Hopefully the test results will prove my worry wrong.

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In a few minutes we're going to be heading back to New York. We've been visiting Greg's folks here in San Antonio, Texas, where we've been pretty much housebound since Saturday, soaking up the sun and lounging poolside for the past four days. It's certainly a different pace from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, what with the gated communities, the perfect houses with their perfectly manicured lawns and the perfectly mannered children of the perfect neighbours. Everything is so Truman Show.

But there's only so much I can take of the perfectly ordered communities, the perfectly groomed trees, the perfectly perfect perfection of planned suburbia.

I need to get back to New York.

I need to get back to the dirty streets, the apartments falling apart at the seams, the rude people down the street.

Is it really bad of me to say I'm in a rush to get back home?

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My mother's eldest sister passed away a few days ago. It's an interesting thing, this death business, watching people just disappear before my eyes as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Then I think about it: it is the most normal thing in the world, isn't it? This death thing, I mean.

The wake was in Chinatown today, right off Canal Street in one of the funeral parlours opposite the volleyball courts and the championship game being played there. Although I had been to funerals of family members before, including my father's, I had never been to a wake such as this, and I was wide-eyed in wonder at the goings-on around me.

From the Chinese characters streaming down the rectangular chrysanthemum bouquets hanging on walls yellowed with age, to the gentle chanting and gongs piping in over the tinny speakers overhead, to the quiet exchange of money among elders, to the tiny altar in front of the casket that held continually burning incense and candles and food offerings, to the black armbands and sackcloth overalls and blue ribbons in the hairs of the daughters…

Everything came in threes. Three bows of respect holding three sticks of incense at the altar, three bows of acknowledgement in front of the casket, three people sitting vigil at the side of the body, three of each of the three types of candles burning bright. Three, six, twelve, my mother explained to me. Good numbers.

The closest family members spent much of their time rolling tiny squares of paper and artificial money, then setting them on fire and tossing them into an urn at the foot of the altar. For the dead, my mother said, so that they may have something to tide them over in the afterlife.

I sat in the tiny room, filled with relatives I should have known but didn't, fascinated by the colours and smells and a hundred hushed conversations going on around me in a language I could not understand. I sat there, burning as fast as I could the images into memory.

We left the funeral parlour two hours later, each taking some sweets (for the good memories) and a shiny nickel wrapped in white paper (for our own prosperity) at the door. I wanted to stay for a bit longer, mesmerized as I was by the strangeness of it all, but we needed to go. Others were there to grieve, too, and we had already paid our respects. We stepped out of the air-conditioned room and into the late Sunday evening, and headed for the subways home.

***

I never knew my aunt, really. She was always this strange woman I couldn't understand, and who couldn't understand me either. As a child, I dreaded New York, because I knew it meant climbing the ten flights of stairs to visit her tiny apartment on Hester Street, and having to endure her poking and prodding and questioning why I didn't speak Cantonese yet. She loved it when we visited her, though, and my mother would sit there translating back and forth the few obligatory pleasantries I would say to her before I ran off to watch American cartoons on her tiny tv set. She loved it when we visited, yes, but I couldn't wait to get out of there. Out of the cramped apartment full of old people smells and old people clothes and old people language and customs.

I hadn't visited her much since I moved to America myself, some thirteen or so odd years ago. She remained at the periphery of my memory, a strange woman in a strange world, though I often thought of her and what our little visits meant to me as a child. Even as an adult, I was still afraid to visit her, and though I did on occasion, I always seemed to be there as a ten-year old, sitting quietly and fidgeting in her little apartment, waiting for the questioning to be over so I run to see what Scooby and his friends were up to.

She lived to be a hundred and one, my aunt. That's a pretty ripe old age, I'd say. I didn't know her, really, no I didn't, but I know she would have been happy that we came by to see her today.

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I woke up late in a panicked rush this morning. It was eight thirty. I had slept through my alarm clock and the corporate rat race had long begun without me. I ran down into the subway station and threw myself onto the first train I saw. It was the F. Damn, damn, damn, wrong train. I needed the E.

I jumped off at the next stop.

I stood on the platform at the edge of the yellow line, closer than most, my toes inches away from the closing train doors, my back to the throngs of passengers crowding around me. I felt the dark heat of the underground envelop me, and tiny beads of perspiration began to form under my shirt. Then the train took off, the wind of its flight brushing urgently against my cheek.

I stared for a moment into the sudden void where the train had just moments before stood, and took a deep, deep breath as I steadied myself.

A station conductor came up to me.

You're standing too close to the edge, sir.

He looked me in the eye and gently motioned to step back.

You're too close to the edge.

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Everyone in the city looks a bit roasted this week. Every face you see, every bit of exposed arm or leg or neck or shoulder, they're all red. I guess everybody got a bit of sun last weekend.

We got our share of redness from four days in Ogunquit, Maine, baking ourselves under the seaside sun and daring to walk only up to our ankles into the frigid waters of the Atlantic. Silly me, I sprayed some sunblock on myself and forgot to rub it into my right shoulder, and now I have shoulder sunburn in the shape of droplets.

Thursday morning the beach was delightfully uncrowded. Most of the vacationers had not yet arrived for the weekend, and we lay our towels out on the sand, stretching ourselves out as far as we cared. I walked over to the wooden fence that separated the beach from the sandy dunes, and closed my eyes for a few minutes as I soaked in the sun and marveled at the warm breezes that blew strong and promised to take me away somewhere wonderful. The tall grasses tickled my belly, and I laughed silently to an invisible audience.

We watched the fireworks on the fourth from the Marginal Way, which stretches from Ogunquit Beach to Perkins Cove. Fireworks aren't really our thing, but we clambered onto the rocks along with the rest of the crowds and oohed and ahhed as the skies exploded again and again in a thousand different colours.

The remaining days we ate. We ate and ate and ate. We ate lobster and clams and shrimp and scallops and chowder and bisque and fudge and apple pie and ice cream. There are few things that compare to eating ice cream on a sweltering summer day, racing as fast as you can to the bottom of the container before the sun melts it all away.

It was as perfect as a Fourth of July weekend should be.

Contrast that with today, where I woke from a dream about a group of gun-toting ninja Hezbollah women terrorists chasing me around the city. Yes, really. Don't ask.

Can we all see why I so desperately need to go back on vacation?

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