Mocking our elders

Last fall, my father had what's known as a "peripheral arterial graft," which basically means the doctors put in a whole new artery from the groin down past the ankle. As you can imagine, you end up with quite a scar. And this being my father, he was exceedingly proud of it.

A couple weeks after the operation, he was over at Canterbury Place (my mother's nursing home; she was still alive at this point), regaling three or four nurses with his surgical saga. Needless to say, the story was not complete without a display of the results, in their fullest extent. So my father, not being one to let propriety stand in the way of 32 inches of suture, unbuttoned, unzipped and dropped trow. 

Yes, he was wearing his boxers. And the only people around were the nurses, give or take a patient or two in the la-la land of advanced dementia. But still. 

When I asked him about it afterward, one of the nurses having filled me in with great amusement, he said, "But they're nurses! It was of medical interest!"  

All of which goes to explain why I had to riff on a certain well-known pun (featuring the future mayor of Portland) for Dad's birthday card: 

I hear the card was a big hit with the nurses. :-)