It took less than 24 hours for life in California to tank. I really hope that this isn't a sign of what living at home is going to be like this time around. What happened that's so terrible you ask, well, I'll tell you.

My father calls my mother and I earlier this week to find out what day we're flying home and to his dismay, my mom tells him that it won't be until Thursday evening, but she'd have to call and tell him the exact time. We'd already deternined that our best options for travel were the last two flights to Burbank from Salt Lake City on Southwest, but since we didn't have our tickets yet we couldn't tell him which one we'd actually fly out on. Later in the evening we bought the tickets, but my mom didn't call and tell my father the time, even though I gave her the itenerary so that she could. Wednesday night comes along and I mention to my mother that she still needs to call him so he can actually meet us at the airport. Of course she agrees and promptly calls him, but there's no answer on his cell phone or at home. We just figured that he wasn't home from work yet (he consistently gets home from work after 10pm because he commutes and he has to make sure computers are working for the offices on the other side of the world) and that he either forgot his cell phone at home, battery was dead, bad reception, whatever. My mother left messages on his voicemail and the answering machine, asking him to call her to confirm when he got them, and then we went on our merry little way.

Well, Thursday morning comes and we still haven't heard from him yet to our dismay. We finish up our packing and my brother arrives to take us to the airport (both of my vehicles went back to California a week and a half prior) and to go to brunch before we left. At this point though dad is far from our minds as we're making sure that everything is ready for me to leave. Since this was a complete move, not just a couple of months vacation that I usually take in the summer, we had to check every nook and cranny to make sure I got everything and that everything was clean since 3 BYU students would be moving in at the end of the week. Once we're at the airport my mother decides that we ought to call dad one more time to make sure that he got the previous night's messages and would be there to pick us up. She calls both the home phone and his cell phone. No answer. Well, this is a little disconcerting since we'll be getting on a plane in a couple of hours and we still don't know if we have a ride home yet.

Fast forward several hours and picture my mother and I sitting on a planter outside of the terminal A baggage claim, cell phones in hand and blankets wrapped around us because of the chilly night air. Just as we had feared we'd arrived in Burbank, almost an hour late because of a delay, and there was nobody there to pick us up. My mother kept suggesting things that might have prevented him from getting there on time, like traffic, but I've flown between Utah and California enough to know that my father is never late to the airport. He's concientious enough to check the traffic conditions before he leaves and he knows how to get just about anywhere in the greater LA area without problems. I've never once had to wait for him to arrive.

Sitting there at the baggage claim we proceed to tag team his various forms of communication. We constantly call home, his cell phone, and now, because of desperation, his work phone. There's no answer on any of them. Finally my mother decided to call somebody that lives up the street to check on the house. The house is safe and sound, nobody home, and his truck is not in the driveway. This means that he's either at work, on his way to get us, on his way home having forgotten about us or something has happened. We wait a little while longer, hoping that it's the second option. With no such luck we decide to call my brother's to find out if something had happened and they were contacted. The first person we called was Matthew; he had called home multiple times on Wednesday night, but failed to get any answer. Other than that, he hadn't heard anything. Then we called Marcus who knew absolutely nothing. He doesn't own a car, but luckily he had plans to go into work the next day so he had a rental car that his company pays for so he can make it to work. He offers to pick us up, but my mother says that we're going to wait a little while longer, long enough for the last flight to come in, just in case my father assumed that we'd be taking the later flight. That time comes and goes without any sign from my dad, so of course we called Marcus and had him come to pick us up.

Now we have to have a flashback to last summer. Last summer my dad kind of started his midlife crisis, a little late in life though. He bought a motorcycle. A very big and expensive BMW, fully loaded. Why you need a 6 cd changer in a motorcyle I'll never figure out, but he had to have one. And I laughed becasue he was working at Honda at the time. I would have thought he'd buy a Honda. Whatever. That summer my mother decided to take a couple of classes at BYU so she came up to live with me for a few months, deserting my father and brother at home by themselves. If you know anything about my parents, you'd know this is a hard thing for them to do. After 34 years of marriage they're still so romantically mushy that it makes one sick to watch them. They call each other constantly when they're apart.

One Friday night she calls home and gets no answer, Saturday: no answer; Sunday: no answer. Finally on Monday my brother answers the phone. It turns out that my father had crashed his motorcyle while driving home from work on Friday. He had quite a few injuries, including broken bones and had to be hospitalized the entire weekend. My mother was furious that he nor my brother had called to tell her what had happened, but she was also suspicious that something else was up because the injuries that he was claiming to have would not have warranted several days in a hospital. She calls Marcus and tells him what happened and asks him to take a trip home to kind of find out the truth and report back to us. Sure enough, there was a lot more wrong with him. So much so that he couldn't go back to work and his contract was terminated and when he could finally walk it was with crutches and it took the rest of the summer to get him to the point where he could use just a cane and start looking for a job. When my mother finally went home she grilled my brother on why he hadn't told her anything and he said it was becase my dad had told him not to. He didn't want to worry her.

Okay, so let's fast forward back to the present. We're driving home with Marcus, brainstorming reasons for his being MIA. Of course we kept going back to the idea that something had happened to him and we hadn't been notified. Given past practices, that wouldn't be too outrageous. We get home and the house is deserted. It just has a weird feel about it, not like that welcoming feel when you come home from vacation; it was more eerie-like. We listen to the answering machine to see if somebody left a message. Nothing. We call his cell phone to see if it had been left at home. Nothing. The cat was out of food and had been so thirsty that there was almost no water in the only open toilet. She obviously had been alone for more than a day. The trash cans were still in the driveway and trash collection day is Wednesday.

My mom decides to do the only thing that she can do, call the California Highway Patrol to find out if there had been a car accident on the freeway involving a Silverado. After waiting several minutes she finally gets through to an operator and gets to explain the situation. The operator gets my dad's personal information and looks everything up on the computer. It turns out that yes, he was in the system, but no, he had not been in a car accident.

It turns out that his driver's license had been suspended, (driving without one is a little less than intelligent, but he claims he had taken care of it) and his truck's registration had expired (which he also claimed to have paid). The combination of the two equals an arrest. My dad takes that moment to lose his sanity and runs out into the traffic lanes of the 118 freeway. Not only did he run out there, but he ran out there with the intent to get hit. He had his hands up in the air and everything. A vehicle narrowly missed him and the cop had to pull him back onto the side. It ended up taking 3 officer's to subdue him and the entire time he was yelling things about hanging himself. The officers had no other choice than to commit him to the nearest state mental health facility, which is where he currently resides.

My father is ADD and has suffered from depression his entire life, but he has never once done anything like this and we though the depression was mostly under control because of his medication. Since being diagnosed with ADD he's been bounced around from medication to medication and he finally started seeing a psychiatrist that deals with adult ADD. We thought things were going well. Apparently they weren't. One of the worst things about the situation is that he's in denial. When my mother was finally able to contact him on Friday morning at the hospital all he told her was that he chose the wrong officer to mouth off to. Like we'd buy that story. You end up in jail for mouthing off to an officer, not a state mental health facility. The only reason we know what happened is becase of a very nice operator on Thursday evening that gave us what information she had access to, which included the name and badge/officer number of the arresting officer and which CHP office to contact him at. We then were able to glean more information from him.

So here's the current family situation: My father is in a mental health facility, the truck is impounded with a 30 day hold, in order to get it out early we have to register it and my father has to show a valid driver's license, because he missed work today he didn't pick up his paycheck, which means we have just enough money to pay to register the truck, but not enough to pay any other sorts of fees, like the fee to get it out of the impound lot or the fee to get my dad a new license, or even pay for the delinquent ticket so that my father can get a new license, my truck has a broken radiator, my mother's car is in the shop getting some body work done, and my scooter won't exactly get us very far, especially since neither I or my mother have valid scooter licenses and my helmet is packed somewhere in the garage and its illegal to drive without one in California, and my brother's rental car has to go back Saturday morning or else he has to start paying for it out of his own pocket.

After some deliberation between my mother, brother, and I, we decided that the best option would be to get a rental car of our own, let my brother take back his and then we'll have a vehicle that will allow us to either visit my dad in the hospital, pick him up if he's released, take him to work on Monday, or if he's not released at least go pick up his paycheck for him. Once we have the money we can worry about things like getting my mother's car out of the shop, getting my car repaired, and of course getting the truck out of the impound. My father was insistent that we pay the registration on his truck, but it's not like it would do any good. We can't get it out of the impound lot anways.

So in conclusion, all I can do is ask that you pray for him (or whatever it is you do), that he'll be okay and everything will work out, and for my mother, that she'll have the strength to carry on no matter how things turn out.