This is my dad -------------------------------------------->Cute, ain't he? My dad is your average, everyday, middle-class, hard-working pain in my ass. He's always been there for me, he loves to call me and tell me inappropriate jokes, and at the moment, he's in the hospital.
Last night, I got out of choir rehearsal and saw a missed call from him. Figuring that this was yet another evening where he calls to check on me (daughter in the big city and all) and then tells me a bad joke, I called him back when the subway went above ground. But he wasn't at home, with the dog (who's not really a dog, but more of a paperweight) in his lap. He was in a hospital bed because he decided to go to the house and do some cleaning. Alone. Now I'm no genius, but I wouldn't go alone to a house in a neighborhood where people are not living at night to do some cleaning. I would wait until it was daylight, when the other people in the neighborhood are there working on their houses, and I wouldn't go alone. But that's me. My dad decided that this was the perfect time for him to go. Mom was at school in Hammond, so he got in his car and drove himself over to the house. Next thing he knows, he wakes up in a little pool of blood and his head is killing him. He's a little sketchy on the details, but somehow he ended up in the ER with twenty staples in his head. By the time I talk to him, he's heading toward lucidity so he can at least tell me who's on call and what tests have been done. I call mom, she is of course FURIOUS because not only was he not supposed to go over there alone, he was probably doing something he should not have been, like moving heavy boxes and standing up too quickly. She took him home last night with his twenty staples and, I would surmise, instructions to stay the hell in his chair.
This morning, after a rather unrestful night of sleep, I awoke to a voice message on my phone from my mom. She's on her way to Natchitoches to go fetch the brother as his spring break starts today and he needs to be out of the dorm by 4pm, and oh by the way, Pop is back at the hospital. No, he's not at work, he's back in the ER. He passed out again while walking the dog around 5am. So I call him and tell him that this is wholly unacceptable, couldn't he have waited a week to pull this kind of stunt because I'm going to be home in five days for crying out loud.
He chuckles, tells me that he's propped up reading the paper and waiting for the cardiologist to come check on him.
I love my father. We are cut from the same cloth in more ways than I think most people can fully describe or appreciate without seeing us together. Say a little prayer for the old man; that he might manage to not do anything too self-destructive before I get down there to beat him senseless.
