Last year, I fell ill just after Thanksgiving. I was sicker than I remember being in years. Then I fell ill again on a return from a Christmas vacation in Ruidoso. All of this illness has me feeling my mortality, but since I am a big fan of Dad Jokes—and being a dad who is approaching his sixtieth birthday—a couple of them came to my mind during recovery. I can’t help it. I come from a long line of folks who tell jokes on their death beds.
The first of these jokes has to do with my eventual reaction to cold medicines. Over the years I have noticed a fairly standard progression as the disease works its way through my body and eventually out of it.
Q: What is the scariest thing about being sick?A: Realizing you have to sneeze and the drugs you’re on give you the runs.
The second Dad Joke comes from a much more humiliating realization.
Q: What is the saddest thing about getting older?A: Realizing that you now consider coffee a recreational drug.
That last one would make Charley Davidson, who once referred to coffee as “the nectar of the gods,” very sad.
