The Queen Mother Is Summoned

While people were making political jokes about 4am phone calls last year, my Queen Mother actually got one.

Mrs. Francis, Your Majesty, this is Doctor So-And-So in Flagstaff. Your son has been in an accident while he was at a ball. He shattered his right arm. He's in the hospital. He might not be able to turn a doorknob again.

She and the Royal Father hastily arrange zig-zag flights to the mountainous retreat. A short time after I regain consciousness from a difficult night of surgery, she is at my bedside. I am drugged and writing with sadness, but she is here, and she knows exactly what I need. She's been through this with me three times before.

A miscalculated jump over a shrubbery fence as a child brought me down on that same arm.

"Mom, I think I broke my arm," I told her, coming in from outside.

She looked at it. "Oh, honey, I think you did." She picked up the kitchen phone to call the hospital, one hand over her forehead. She'd just been watching an episode of Eight Is Enough, where one of the main characters had just broken his arm as well.

"This should be a new experience for you," she said to me as she took me to the hospital with my kid brother in the back seat, soon to be mildly jealous of the attention.

Both of us would go through the drill two more times.

I crashed on my right arm during my 8th birthday party at a roller-skating rink. I had invited my entire grade-school class to the festivities, and two boys were racing each other when I ended up in the way. Fifteen minutes into the bash I was gone, before the presents or the cake or the song. This time, the Royal Father was at my side, leaving the Queen Mother to worry about me while she supervised the rest of the children. She watched a girl fall and sprout a knot on her head. Her Royal Highness greeted me at the door when I returned home, saying how sorry she was and pointing to the presents from the guests stacked neatly on the dining room table.

Then came the fall from my bike a few years after that. Same arm. Again she endures the worrying, the doctors and the bills. She wonders what the medical staff thinks of her, this mother whose child keeps coming back in. I was too young to comprehend the possible criminal suspicions.

Both of us thought we had grown out of it until that night last August. At 36, I am still her child, her firstborn, the person she agonized about when I told her I was leaving home to take my first TV job more than 1,000 miles away in Texas. She worried when I took those trips to Virginia, Florida, New York City and Washington, D.C. She sought me out and found me on the phone when she needed reassurance.

Now her dreaded scenario was here, but I was alive, and she was there for me. She drove me back to Tucson in my car after two depressing days in the hospital. We went to Walmart together and picked up what I would need to live alone with one hand. She nearly begged me to come back to California with her for a few days. Thanks, Your Majesty, but I really need to recover and get back to work. Mom needed to mother, but I needed to heal.

I know she still worries when I take trips out of town on my own. Nothing can change that. She is still the Queen. She will still issue Royal edicts about being careful and not driving fast and wearing non-skid dancing shoes. I'll try, Your Majesty, I will.