The Jews are ancient enough to have negotiated a private arrangement with time. According to the Hebrew calendar, it is now he year 5787, which means history is older than advertised and no longer covered by warranty. The year changes in September, during Rosh Hashanah, Hebrew for “head of the year.” Two weeks ago, I went to Winnipeg to celebrate with my mother, who is ninety-six. My brothers and I also had a technological plan: Ray-Ban Meta glasses. My mother is almost blind, and these perform small miracles, unavailable for approximately 5,786 of the Jew’s 5,787 years. You put them on and ask the tiny microphone what is in front of you. The glasses describe a person, a letter, a hallway, or the ingredients on a jar. They can tell you the weather in Winnipeg or Wichita. The glasses look on your behalf and whisper the world back into your ears. You can probably ask them the sound of one hand clapping.

I was at Polo Park Shopping Centre, surrounded by the usual abundance of things nobody knew they needed until they saw them marked down thirty percent, when my phone rang. My mother had fallen. She couldn’t get up. It was an accident. What stood in front of all of us, no machine could fix. She was on the floor, in too much pain to stand. At the emergency room, they did not discover her fractured sternum until the second day. This is another arrangement with time: at ninety-six, the future can change before anyone figured out what happened yesterday.

I changed my departure date. She remained in emergency. The doctors wanted to admit her, but wanting to admit someone and finding them a room are now two separate medical specialties. The needs are enormous, the staff strained, the system held together by fluorescent lights and people apologizing for things they did not cause. Many layers of pain, humiliation, fear, and hope. One of the hardest things for me was that no music was available to help her transcend the hell of this situation. We have glasses that can identify a jar of pickles, but in the moment when a human being most needs Bach, Leonard Cohen, or Maria Callas, the hospital offers curtains, machines that beeps and random intercom announcements like yellow jackets buzzing around your face in autumn.

My mother feared she might die here. This did not seem like pessimism so much as a reasonable read of the room. She is home now. My brother Gordie flew in from Israel, where he lives inside a very different arrangement with danger and time. He took over for me and spent the following week helping her. The glasses can tell my mother what is in front of her. The rest of us are still trying to learn how to do that.