My mom overreacts. I don’t begrudge it and I don’t judge it and I’m certainly used to it, because mom has always been a wonderfully neurotic Jew from Long Island who thinks the sky is falling or her plane is crashing or everyone has cancer. It’s fine. It’s culturally-appropriate. It’s an early Woody Allen movie. One of the good ones. And, shameless mama’s boy that I am, this condition has led to many moments in my own life where I’ll find myself complaining about everything ranging from the perilous state of the world to my grandmother’s increasing frailty as she approaches her 86th birthday to eggs that I don’t remember when I bought and that I think will probably strike me dead with plague if I so much as wave them over a nearby pan. And my mom will hear these various kvetchings and she will shake her head slowly and she will look sadly down at the floor and she will say, “Oh, honey. I am sorry that you aren’t less like me.” That’s okay, mom. We like you anyway.

Which is what makes her recent state of sudden, Zen calm as disturbing as it is. It started on Saturday afternoon, when I casually called my sister in New Jersey to get the latest update on the constant east coast rain. We chatted for a minute about the weather and how it was affecting the kids and the dog, and I believe I said something really, really insightful such as, “It sounds like it’s been raining a lot.” Wow. It sure does sound like someone’s been watching Sam’s Five Day AccuWeather Forecast Of Total Obviousness. With which there was a slight pause, followed by my sister asking in her softest, most sympathetic therapist tone, “Have you talked to mom?”

Because I live 3,000 miles away from most of a family I am extremely close with, the words, “Have you talked to mom?” rank right up there with “Is your TV on?” and “I’m really sorry to call so late” in the great pantheon of Scary Conversation Starters From Family Members That Can End In No Good. And after I spent six months in Sydney my junior year of college and arrived back in New York to find out that my mom had done a stint in the hospital while I was away and no one told me because they didn’t want to disturb my trip, I think I’m understandably jumpy about the possibility that something will go wrong a fair distance from me and that 1) no one will tell me about it or 2) I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it even if they had.What happened?In short, my parents’ house has been reduced by half. The lower floor is a finished basement split into two sections: my stepfather’s music studio, all of the computers in the house, and the laundry room on one side, and an unfinished storage area that runs the length of the rest of the house on the other. As of last Saturday, a flood resulting from three straight weeks of rain on Long Island submerged the lower level of the house in varying amounts of water, destroying almost everything in it. Mom bought the house thirty-three years ago with the man who would become my father, paid off the last of the mortgage in 2002, and has been methodically redoing every room in the house since she remarried almost ten years ago. This will probably put that longstanding project on hold for a while.They sat upstairs watching the rain, knowing the water was coming in and not being able to do anything about it. It’s been sunny in New York for a few days now and the water has stopped coming in, but the cost of the water removal alone has already exceeded $10,000. Just to get the water out. Once all of the water is out, they’ll throw away everything in the basement, including the entirety of my earthly goods from the apartment I just moved out of in New York, featuring: all of my furniture, most of my clothes, my books, my CDs, my baseball cards, and, well, everything that didn’t make the trip out here in my small small car when I came back to LA. My stepfather, a musician, has lost every stitch of his original scores written for the last fifty years, so if he’s having trouble engendering sympathy for my $20 Target lamp, I get it. Everyone’s feeling bad for everyone else and no one’s freaking out, including mom, which is kind of nice and incredibly scary at the same time.