DidgeriDad

[chanaleh]

I got home from shul on Monday night right around 10:30pm, and not three minutes after I walked in the door, my dad called (from Indiana). It's rare that I am just sitting at home when he manages to call, and we had a really good talk for at least an hour and a quarter. ("We're making up for lost time," I commented. "You can't make up for lost time," he immediately chided. "Okay, maybe not, but you can work to repair past deficits by investing your future time wisely." "Hmph...")

Near the end -- long after I had asked what was new over there and gotten the usual "oh, nothing much" -- I happened to ask after his sleeping. (He's always had sinus issues, and now has a CPAP, but still has insomnia and generally disordered sleep.) And after a rundown of how bad it's recently been, he added, "Oh, well, you know, I did do something kind of... uncharacteristic."

He had seen "some kind of ad on the internet" (!) (maybe this one) about how playing the didgeridoo is therapeutic for sleep apnea. (Which I'd never heard before. This is where I said out loud "Oh my God, I cannot wait to hear the end of this sentence.")

He ordered one. He's been working at it for about 3 weeks.

No concrete results yet in terms of the sleeping; he said he really hasn't achieved the "circular breathing" technique at all, and maybe that's the muscle work that's beneficial, once you grasp it. Hard to say.

But I think you have to know my dad (brilliant, taciturn, dry-witted, cautious, eminently practical; artistic, but not at all musical himself) in order to grasp just how delightful this mental picture is. My dad sitting upstairs in his room calmly applying himself to his didgeridoo practice (while, incidentally, my stepmother rages and snarls about it downstairs). It was the best thing I heard all day. Maybe all week.

It warmed my heart.

Comments

[dpolicar]

I got most of the way through this post before realizing my original parsing of "didgeridoo playing" -- namely, recordings of the music therefrom -- was fitting the narrative increasingly poorly and an alternative parsing was called for.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

That is SO FUNNY. I have edited it to "playing the didgeridoo". Less pithy, but harder to mistake. :-D