Grim Reaper Delivery.

When my mom answers the phone and says "Soooo...have you talked to your father yet today?"  experience has shown me that I should immediately hang up the phone and dial my pop. Not necessarily because I'm terrified of the bad news that I'm about to hear, but I know that his version of whatever bad news I'm about to hear is not going to be an episode of Days of Our Lives.  My mom's delivery of bad news takes twenty minutes and a panic attack to learn that my dad is, in fact not dead (because I was could have sworn that was where the story was leading).

Yet somehow, I keep falling back into the same ole black hole of bad news delivery from my mother.  This is how the conversation goes:

Mom: "Soooo....have you talked to your father yet today?"

Me: "Umm nope, but now I think I probably need to."

Mom: "Hmmm, well, hmmm, ok.  Hmmmmmm...well, I don't want you to freak out, everything is going to be fine, but..."

And then she goes into a 30 minute story about when my sister was visiting and they were doing some yard work and they found this mole on my dad's arm and you know how your father has that dark complexion and so he doesn't wear sunscreen and I keep telling him he needs to wear that sunscreen and you hear all those horror stories about people with melanoma and you know what melanoma is right, and so Rachel and I both thought for sure he should get it checked out but you know how your father hates to go to the doctor and I also told him he should get that sleep apnea checked out because he snores, have you ever heard your father snore, I mean the house sounds like it's falling down, but he says he doesn't have time to go to all these doctor appointments right now and he's been so busy fixing the Honda, did I tell you the Honda broke down, so your father finally goes to the doctor and we've all just been on pins and needles the past couple of weeks and do you know what they did, they took a HUGE piece of his arm out, I mean HUGE, like pineapple sized and they did a biopsy, you know what a biopsy is right, I've gotten a ton of them, well it's when they take a...

Me: "MOM I KNOW WHAT A BIOPSY IS.  IS DAD ALIVE?"

Mom:  "Oh.  Fine."

Me: "Well can you just tell me?  My heart is palpitating over here."

Mom: "Well yeah, of course he's fine! Geesh."

Phew.  So then she tells me the modified version I would have loved to have heard 20 minutes ago, I hang up the phone and call my dad and this is how the conversation goes:

Me:  "Hey, you ok?  I just talked to mom and it took me a while to figure out you hadn't died in a hit and run."

Pop: "Yeah, not to worry, they just took a chunk out of my arm and we're going to monitor it closely.  They should have taken some off the other side too, make me more sculpted on both sides, like a bicep tuck."

Done and done.