Ode to My Mother

It's funny how childhood memories can creep back into your consciousness when you've got a fever and a few hours to yourself. While I was lying under a pile of blankets on the couch yesterday, drifting in and out of sleep, I flashed back to a bout with the flu I'd had as a child in Dallas 20 years ago. I remembered how my mother set up a tray table beside my bed and left a bell on the table. If I needed her, she said, and I felt too weak to call, just ring the bell. I tried not to abuse the priviledge. But I remember ringing the bell and she would bring me tea or a steaming bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup and a grilled chedder cheese sandwich on wheat bread. I still get cravings for grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell's chicken noodle soup when I'm sick (even when I don't have the appetite for anything else). I imagine it's not the food I crave so much as my mother's presence. When I was young, just knowing that she was as close as that bell was comforting.
So I called her yesterday at her home in Florida, where she's spending the winter with my stepfather, doing aerobics, taking tennis lessons, and working on a book. I didn't even have to tell her I was sick. As soon as she heard my voice, she asked "What's wrong?"
I told her how I'd come down with the flu and how my fever had reached nearly 102 degrees and the irony of not taking my own advice about getting a flu shot. She didn't give me a hard time about it; she just gave me a sympathetic ear. And though she was hundreds of miles away, just hearing her voice made me feel better.
My husband had to go straight from work to a dinner last night for karate black belts (he is a shodan, or first-degree black belt). So he didn't get home till after 11 p.m. I was dozing on the couch upstairs when he arrived. He bent over and kissed me and asked me how I was feeling. "I brought something home for you," he said.
Then he set a grocery bag down on the table beside me and pulled out a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup.