Dad's Heart--Part One

July 16, 2014

My dad was recently hospitalized with scary arrhythmia in his heart. Dad is edging up on 75 but looks a decade younger and commands life as a man three decades younger. Don't get me wrong: he's not chasing young stewardesses around the plane or attempting to use language "like what the kids are saying these days." Instead, he has had life by the balls all his life and he isn't about to stop now.

Dad is the guy you want to sit next to at a ballgame because he knows everything but doesn't act like it. He is also the guy you want to know when anything around you is broken--from your arm to your car to your finances--because he knows everybody (at least in our corner of the universe), he doesn't act like he does, but he manages to squeeze out favors with ease. The fact that he usually returns favors ten-fold probably has something to do with it.

Of course, like us all, he is human. He has a temper (which has tempered as the years have passed)...and, well, that's the biggest flaw that comes to mind. Other than that I have long considered him a little less human and a bit more awesome than the rest of us. Thus, the shock and terror it sends through me when he has to fight for some type of compromised body part or function.

Anytime I see him in a hospital bed (a sight which has been miraculously rare), it is like seeing a sturdy truck with a flat or a 4-cylinder engine: it doesn't make sense. The only times I've ever seen him sit still are at church and during Sports Center. So seeing him reclined and poked with tubes in and out and a heart monitor tracking the irregularity of that heart tilts the planet a little too far off its axis for my tastes. On this day, it made me want to lean down and yell into his chest for the heart to hear, "hey, dumbass, get back on track and DO YOUR JOB! DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU'RE DEALING WITH?" (Something he, of course, would never say.) I held back, though, since the heart doesn't have ears and if that little tactic worked, there would be hospital halls filled with shouting and millions more hearts still beating.

(Continue to part 2 please :))