This describes the entrance of Marley's ghost. It's Dickens trying to scare the pants off his readers, a passage that you might find in any Stephen King story (with a lot more profanity and someone crapping himself to boot). It all boils down to one fear: the approach of something unknown and frightening.
This morning, just as I was about to jump in the shower, the phone in my house started ringing. Now, when a phone rings at 10 a.m., I don't necessarily jump to the conclusion that it's anything dire or tragic. When a phone rings at 4 a.m., I make a couple of assumptions: (1) someone is dying, or (2) someone is dead. So I picked up the receiver with a little bit of anxiety.
It was one of my sisters. She was calling to tell me they had to call an ambulance for another one of my sisters. Most of my siblings are diabetic. The sister for whom they called the ambulance had an extremely low blood sugar (hypoglycemic) reaction in the middle of the night. When the EMS people got there, my sister's blood glucose was 23. She was thrashing and screaming in bed. They worked on her for close to an hour and got her stable. She's doing well. At least at 4 a.m. she was doing well. Speaking from experience, however, she's going to have one heck of a headache for about two days.
I didn't need any caffeine to get myself moving today. That phone call was enough, better than any ghost rattling around in a cellar or booming doors open. I have been a diabetic for close to 30 years now, and I've had my share of close calls. They scare the hell out of you. They scare the hell out of the people who care about you. I'd prefer no more phone calls at four o'clock in the morning.
Unless you are the Swedish Academy, calling to tell him he's won the Nobel Prize, don't dial up Saint Marty before 8 a.m.
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| Unless you speak Swedish, don't call |
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