Zoe on Zoom taught me that an “access point” is a moment in space-time when I feel sufficiently safe to risk human connection, and I found myself musing after sundown that every moment of my lifetime of space-time is either an access point or the absence of an access point: I am either seeking or avoiding connection.  Dad felt safe enough to tell Cecilia his leg felt “off.”  Cecilia felt safe enough to tell Mom that Dad’s leg was alarmingly swollen and red, and Mom told Jeanette, and Jeanette told her siblings, and announced to Mom and Dad: “We are going to the doctor, now.”  And fear entered my heart, and I wondered, what does this mean? and I thought he might lose his leg to diabetes and infection and gangrene and amputation, altering his life and our lives horribly, this story’s end sprinting too-fast forward.  But the doctor diagnosed cellulitis, a skin infection, and sent Mom and me to Walgreen’s for antibiotics while Jeanette trundled Dad home.  A mere skin infection—nothing serious—a relief.  Sarah sobered us with facts: cellulitis can lead to sepsis and to septic shock and to death, and she was soooooo glad Jeanette acted quickly.  My sisters are heroines, aren’t they?  They regularly save the day.  Dad became downright chipper, perhaps from the relief of realizing he would keep his leg, and he tooled around the yard in his power chair with his electric hedge trimmers giving each of the many bushes a mullet cut: he could not reach the bush backs.  When Dad was six, he used that leg to climb the neighbor’s old cherry tree, high into its branches, and the neighbor groused, “Get down from that tree!” but the boy only climbed higher.  The neighbor threatened to squirt him with water from the garden hose, but the weak stream reached only part way up.  And the neighbor sighed and pulled a nickel from his pocket and offered it to the boy if would climb down from the branches of the old cherry tree.  That day in 1941, a six-year-old boy skipped home five cents richer.  On another day in another tree, Dora grumbled for the boy to come down at once, and he did, with a “Yes, Mother,” because he loved her.  Zoe told me over Zoom that our first and deepest question as human infants is this: Are my needs in life going to be met? and I found myself reflecting that I have asked this question long past my infancy, across my childhood and over my adolescence and into my marriage and my mid-life and will ask this question still in my old age.  And with the asking I also answer: Yes, I will give myself to you, to you, and to you, and to you….