RaisingDad

A doctor tells his patient: "I've got good news, and I've got bad news. Which do you want to hear first?" "The bad news," answers the patient. "Okay," the doctor begins, "your son is dead, your daughter's in a coma, your wife has run away with your best friend, your dog got run over by a car, and you have an incurable rare disease." "Holy mackerel," the patient said, only he didn't say 'mackerel.' "What's the GOOD news?" "The good news is that there's no more bad news."           I tell you that old joke to set up the exciting conclusion of the sad adventure of me hurting my back. A story, I might add, that attracted almost no readers. But don't feel sorry for me, send money instead. Anyway...      The bad news is that my Dad either still thought I was making fun of the way he walked or he got tired of watching me hobble around the house like an invalid, because he inte...

"Well, how did you hurt your back?"      It took a little coaxing, but my Dad was finally starting to believe I wasn't making fun of him.      "Picking weeds," I told him.      "Picking weeds?"      Yeah, picking weeds. I've got to come up with a more exciting story about how I hurt my back.      The guy I told you about, the one who couldn't help me load my cooler onto my truck? He was a Border Patrol agent, and he hurt his back moving the desk in his office.      What a wuss, I used to think. I guess I can't think that any more. (Although I probably will.)      He's been on light duty ever since, and no longer goes out in the field any more. Instead of paying him to be so bored he decided to rearrange his office furniture, our tax dollars are paying him to sit and play solitaire on his computer.      But I digress... ...

Getting older sure stinks.      This morning I woke up at 6:30 and decided to pick a few weeds. This was before I had coffee to lubricate my joints, but the morning was cool on what promised to be a hot day, and the job needed to get done. So I grabbed one of those plastic grocery bags that I also use to pick up my Dad's dog's poops with, and I headed outdoors, still in my pajamas. My plan was, I would pick weeds, then, once done, my pajamas would go into the hamper, and I would go into the shower.      It almost worked out that way.      I threw out my back on the third weed.      Don't think I'm some kind of 98-pound weakling. I've only just spent the last few days cleaning and polishing the wood floors in our house. That's a lot of bending over and moving heavy furniture around. Why can't my wife like the cheap stuff? It weighs less. And not only that, a few weeks back...

This morning I'm working my tail off, cleaning and polishing the oak floor. If I knew getting wood floors was going to be this much work, I would have gotten a divorce, instead.      Just kidding.      Maybe I would have just poured concrete and gone for a more industrial look. That's what I would have done, but I didn't. My wife had other ideas. So instead we went with the wood floors. Actually, she went with the wood floors. I just went along.      Wood floors.      Throughout the house.      Throughout the ENTIRE house.      Man, I must really love my wife.       And, while I'm hard at work doing the kind of manual labor I swore when I was a teenager I would never do, guess who's sitting in the great room watching TV?      Yeah.      My Dad.      And I...

I pressed the button, and guess what ?      The TV came on.      Yeah, the TV works. That answered my third question. Someone, or something (and I'm not ruling out the possibility that there might be a ghost or a phantasm of some kind doing what ghosts and phantasms do), pressed the main cut-off button and turned the power off, but whoever or whatever it was will forever remain unknown. All I know for sure is that it couldn't have been my Dad, because he already told us a dozen times that, not only did he NOT touch the back of the TV, but he never even THOUGHT of touching the back of the TV.      But if that's the case, then how did anyone get to that back part of the TV? I don't know, because it's not like the power button is within reach and out in the open. I didn't even find it until I had brought it into our kitchen and gotten a better look at the situation. Someone--or som...

     My wife and  and I work on removing the old TV and installing his new one. Okay, mainly it's me removing the old TV and installing the new one, and my wife cheering me on. Before I remove the old TV, I again checked all the controls, just in case I missed something. No, nothing. Everything's good.      I'm done with my end of the job, and now it's my wife's turn to begin hers. She quickly becomes busy adjusting the color, size of picture, etc. The VIP treatment. Nothing's too good for the old guy sitting in my house in my chair watching a baseball game --any baseball game--on my TV and waiting for all the work to be done for him . If push comes to shove, I guess I'd rather have it that way, him away in the house, than trying to help my wife and I with something that he knows nothing about, which would have made TWO guys doing something they know nothing about. I'm n...