Why you should always wear your Sunday best!

As I mentioned in a previous post, from a fairly young age my dad suffered from heart problems, having several heart attacks, numerous scares and two by-pass surgeries.  Indeed, as a young girl I remember lying in bed at night listening for the creak of the floorboards and just praying it wasn't mom running downstairs to call the ambulance again.  A horrible time for all of us of course but, in retrospect, it was funny on occasion too.

 

Now while I know I probably shouldn't be talking about my dad's underwear here it is central to the story.  Dad - and most men of his generation I guess - wore boxer shorts, for comfort and probably because there wasn't much by way of choice anyway.  One particular day when he was at work, the elastic around the waistband of his boxers and the actual material separated company but the elastic didn't actually break.  So dad, not really knowing what else to do, just pulled the elastic up and put it over his head in order to keep his "drawers" from falling down.

 

Well as (bad) luck would have it, that day he was taken ill at work.  They called the ambulance to take him to hospital and called my mom at her place of work to meet the ambulance at the hospital. Several hours later it was determined to be a false alarm and that dad had not suffered another heart attack.  That of course was when mom spotted his boxers in the little cupboard next to his bed.  Well she went somewhat "ballistic" - "oh for God's sake, of all the decent pairs of underpants you have in the drawer you had to wear those!  I swear you do this just to embarrass me sometimes!"  You get the gist of it. To be honest, I suspect it was mostly relief that he was all right and she was just letting off nervous energy, but poor old dad got it in the neck that day I can tell you.

Of course, he made matters worse when he was explaining to her that after they admitted him and the young nurse was trying to undress him as he was lying on the bed, every time she tried to pull his underpants off he sat up!  We all cracked up laughing, but I'm pretty sure he had to dodge a few expletives from mom all the same.  Ahhh tales from another era I think.
 

Picture by Dreamstime