“Lucille!” I thought perhaps I might have heard from under my cool-morning covers the calling of Mom’s name, but I could not deny even in my profound grogginess the second “Lucille!!” with clearly Nelson-like tones, and I jumped from my bed fully alert and threw on my bathrobe and bolted to Dad’s room.  Mom, alerted from downstairs, whence she heard his bellowing even without her hearing aids and even with her ever-present morning music plucking away—this time a harp concerto—raced upstairs, a slow sprint across the house and up on the stair lift in time to hear me call: “Is everything okay, Dad?”   Of course, everything is okay, he said, oblivious of our cause for alarm.  “When you go to Harmons,” he said cheerily, “if they have fresh cherries, open the bag and squeeze one to make sure they are ripe and not rotten or green, and get two bags, no, three, because John likes them, too, and tap on the watermelon like I showed you to make sure it’s ripe and not overripe or green—of course, you can’t tell the taste by tapping.”  Mom sat on her cedar chest crying quietly from fright and relief and frustration, and I could not help remonstrating that I have been sitting on the edge of my metaphorical bed for two years waiting to hear him shout “Lucille!!!” so I could run to his rescue, save him from some crisis, lift him off the floor, and he’s shouting “Lucille!!!!” to make sure we check the ripeness of the cherries at Harmon’s?  “Why, yes,” because company was coming, and everything had to be just right, including the tomato bisque, including two loaves of gluten-free bread, and sliced mild cheese, but no meat for the vegetarian melts, and guacamole and salsa and humus and two bags of corn chips, and gluten-free cakes, and just-right cherries and watermelon.  “I told you we were shopping at 10!” Mom burst out, “and it’s only 8!” and “why would you shout for me throughout the whole house to tell me to squeeze the cherries!” and she stumbled back to the slow lift down the stairs to her harp music and her soggy breakfast, and I could not be angry because of how comical the whole scene struck and because everything was okay, because he was not dead or on the floor but was okay.  “I’m sorry I shouted for Lucille to come,” Dad lamented as I yawned, for my body so ached in the night that I could not sleep and had taken naproxen sodium and half a fluoxetine hydrochloride at one in the morning and had a lovely sleep until I heard “Lucille!!!!!” because 13 miles on the Jordan River down rapids through eddies and mysterious invisible cross currents and from long portages around the dams and with the awkward ins and outs from my kayak on the muddy banks had pulled and twisted and tired me out, but that bird we saw, oh, that bird, that black-crowned night heron that watched me float within ten feet before it flew a hundred feet downstream and watched me again approach until I could see his crimson eye and the long white head feathers streaking loosely down his black back and the hint of yellow on his neck, stretch after hundred-foot stretch, mile after mile, until he flew back up stream back to his territorial stretch to stalk for ducklings and fish.  “You can go back to sleep if you want—it’s only 8 o’clock.”