Talk Like a Pirate and Give Thanks Day

Let the news be Paul Revere'd throughout the land: Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so limber up your yarrhs and advance the fight against global warming.

Tomorrow is also the anniversary of my father's MI. He's a traditionalist, so he went with the standard "older guy cleaning up after a storm" model of cardiac distress that the ERs expect. In the wake of Hurricane Isabel, Il Padre was clearing the back yard of the fallen trees, with the help of a neighbor and the neighbor's eighty-year-old father. Here's a fun fact: Old guys from farming communities in the highlands of Guatemala are often much more physically fit than suburban Americans, and if a member of the latter party is trying to keep up with one from the former, badness can ensue. Badness did ensue. La Mère took one look at Il Padre and packed him into the car for the five-minute drive to our local hospital, which for all its tremendous failings takes you seriously if you show up and mumble "chest pain" to the triage nurse.

I didn't hear about this at first, because the power in my neck of the woods was still out and so I had no phone. But the news made it eventually, mostly via increasingly panicked calls from pay phones, and I made it down to Virginia to join the tag-team cycle of visitors to Il Padre's cherry spot in the curtained wards, where he was surrounded by bleeping machines and looking faintly embarrassed. After getting all the assurances on offer, I went back to the waiting room ("Tag, who's next?") and called my boyfriend, who said all the right things and helped keep the relative level of calm high without being soppy, for which I am still grateful.

And then around 10 PM La Mère and Seesterperson and K-Rock and I went home and made tea, because that's what you do when shit goes down, and we realized that it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day and we had missed it. So each year I call Il Padre on September 19 and remind him, "Arrh, me surly sea squid, belay them MIs for another twelvemonth." So far so good, and that's reason 1,273,448 that pirates are better than ninjas.