So, my dad (who, you will recall, recently had gall bladder surgery, a little detail which will shortly become immensely important to our story) is in the habit of walking up to my place with his cup of coffee in the mornings and chatting for a few minutes before I leave for work. It’s a pleasant little ritual we’ve developed over the last couple of years, a low-key means of connection for a father and his grown son who’ve never been terribly close. We rarely talk about anything more meaningful than whatever funny thing our respective cats did the night before, but these conversations matter anyway.

The other morning was a strange one for these desert climes. It had rained just before sunrise, so everything outside was wet and glistening, and there was a hazy, golden quality to air. It was far more reminiscent of what I remembered of England than Utah, cool and crisp but not truly cold, and Dad and I were both enjoying it. We felt cozy enough inside our coats. The concrete apron around Dad’s shop, which stands behind the old house where I live, was dotted with shallow puddles. As we stood there chatting, I noticed one of my cats lapping at the ground directly in front of a battered old Chevy pickup. Dad’s work truck. The one that leaks numerous fluids cats ought not be ingesting.

“Hey,” I said, “You don’t suppose there’s any anti-freeze in that, do you?”

Dad shrugged, shooed kitty away from the puddle, and then bent down, dipped a finger into the potentially toxic liquid, and stuck it in his mouth.

A little jolt of alarm zipped through my stomach. “Dad…!”

“Ah, it’s fine,” he said, wiping his finger on his pants and then taking a mouth-cleansing sip from the mug in his other hand. “Just rainwater.”

Seeing the expression on my face, he continued in a nonchalant tone. “I used to dip my finger into radiators all the time. It was an easy way of telling whether the mix was strong enough or if you needed to add some more anti-freeze.”

“One of those old-fashioned backyard mechanic things?” I ventured.

“Yeah. ‘Course, nobody told us it’d make your gall bladder go rotten after about 30 years.”

He said it was a deadpan face that would’ve made Buster Keaton proud. Then I caught the twinkle in his eye, and I laughed out loud, and my father, a man who once seemed to me the most terrifyingly humorless creature on Earth, actually cracked a smile himself.

I cherish these mornings.

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but 2012 got off to a pretty shaky start for the Bennion Collective (a wholly owned subsidiary headquartered on the fabulous Bennion Compound).

First of all, remember that awful head cold I had a few weeks ago? If you’ll recall, The Girlfriend was relatively unfazed while I was knocking at death’s door. Well, that situation inverted itself right after I wrote about my cat wanting to eat my eyes: I began steadily improving (although I still have an irritating dry cough first thing in the morning) but her iteration of this filthy little bioweapon abruptly exploded into a full-blown bronchial infection that kept her indoors on New Year’s Eve and required a round of antibiotics and an inhaler for her to gain any traction at all against it. (Like me, she’s now mostly over it aside from that nagging cough.)

As if Anne trying to retch up her lungs didn’t give me enough to worry about during the first week of January, I got a phone call from my mom on the afternoon of the third, my first day back at the office after a week-long holiday break, to inform me she’d taken Dad to the ER that morning with severe abdominal pains. I was a little miffed she hadn’t bothered to inform me until hours after the fact, but my irritation seemed petty under the circumstances. I had bigger things to be concerned with. Like, the fact that my dad was in the hospital. That would concern anyone, of course, but in my case, the concern was leavened with a big fistful of disbelief. My dad? In the hospital? Nah, my dad doesn’t get sick. Not seriously sick. Not hospital sick. Oh, I’ve seen him injured before, sometimes badly enough to leave him essentially incapacitated for a time (such as when he suffered for several months with a ruptured disk in his back). I’ve seen him ill with the usual complaints: viruses, food poisoning, hangovers (which are kind of the same difference as food poisoning when you think about it). And I’ve seen him physically diminish in recent years as age finally starts to catch up with him. But even with those ailments, in spite of them really, he still looms in my imagination as some kind of elemental bull, immensely strong, fundamentally vital even as he begins to slow down. Such men do not go to the hospital.

Except Dad had to. After two nights of worsening misery — the pain had gone away during the daytime, only to return with a vengeance the following evening — he decided he’d had enough. He spent the first day undergoing a battery of tests, including an MRI, which revealed his gall bladder was full of stones. In addition, one of those stones had escaped into his bile duct and gotten wedged there. He underwent two separate laparoscopic surgeries the next day, Wednesday, January 4; the first was to clear the bile duct, followed by the more routine procedure to remove the gall bladder.

The surgeon who removed the gall bladder later told my parents and me that he encountered two major challenges with my dad: the first was that Dad’s abdomen is full of scar tissue from an operation he had when he was an infant, and all that had to be “broomed aside,” whatever that means. I guess this was a tricky enough situation that the surgeon almost abandoned the laparoscopy and opened Dad up. The second issue was the gall bladder itself, which the surgeon seemed rather astounded by. He described it as “ugly,” and “the worst he’d ever seen.” To be blunt, the bladder was filled with pus, and the surgeon couldn’t help but spill some of it into Dad’s abdomen as he was removing the diseased organ, setting the stage for a post-surgical infection. And that, as well as the trauma of having two back-to-back surgeries (and therefore a double-dose of anesthetic) kept Dad in the hospital for three more days.

I was never terribly worried about the surgery itself; Anne had her gall bladder removed several years ago and was home later the same day, so I just expected that Dad’s operation would be similarly smooth. But the aftermath — and the fact that Dad’s case turned out not to be as simple as Anne’s — was much more difficult for me to deal with. It was… sobering… to see him night after night, laying there in a backless hospital johnny while he soaked up antibiotics and painkillers, struggling to sit up and wincing if he twisted his torso too far in any direction. The bull disappeared within the confines of the hospital, and that troubled me in a way that’s difficult to put into words. No one wants to face their parents’ mortality, I guess, or the frailties that precede it. It’s even more difficult when you’re used to seeing your parent as a force of nature.

Of course, it’s all turned out fine. Dad was released to come home on January 8, and even though the release orders called for him to rest and take it easy for six weeks, he was impatient to get back to work after only one. He’s never been the sort to enjoy or even tolerate just sitting around, doing nothing. He had a follow-up with the surgeon a few days ago and was told everything has healed very well, and surprisingly quickly. He still tires easily, though, and just between you and me, I can’t help but wonder if his stamina will ever fully return to its previous levels. But for the most part, everything’s back to normal around here.

Unfortunately, having him out of commission for a couple weeks has thrown a big monkey wrench into certain plans that should’ve been finished — or at least much further along — by now. More on that another time. For now, I’ll just say I really hope the whole damn year isn’t going to be like this…