It turns out that the acoustic guitar Neil Young played on his most recent album “Prairie Wind” was previously owned by country music legend Hank Williams. In his most recent Seattle concert, John Prine played an acoustic guitar previously owned by the late Steve Goodman. The lead singer and songwriter for the Celtic punk band Flogging Molly writes all of his songs on an Underwood manual typewriter manufactured in 1916, the year of the historic Easter Rising in Ireland.

I was thinking about these seemingly unrelated musical and historical facts, and was very close to discovering a revealing truth in them, some kind of hitherto unknown cosmic, space-time connection between history and music and the possibility that, like sound waves released into space traveling through oceans of eternity in search of a discerning ear, the essence of people and events may survive in some physical manifestation and can be detected and maybe even distilled if you put yourself in the right frame of mind to receive it.

I’m pretty sure I was on the cusp of something big – the opaque veil of chaos had begun to fall away and the unarticulated rhythms of the universe had stopped beating their incessant war drums and were making themselves known to me and me alone. A liberating secret was within my humble grasp when suddenly there was a blinding flash of light and… I fell asleep.

I’m not to be totally blamed for nodding off just prior to my moment of revelation. It was at least as much the anesthesiologist’s fault. She had selected that moment to open the floodgates on my IV and send me off to dreamland so a surgeon could get on with a hernia operation I had last week.

A hernia, as you may know, is a tearing of the abdomen wall in what is known in technical medical circles as the “Groinular Region.” The problem with a hernia is that it allows part of one’s intestine to pass through the abdominal wall, whereupon it makes an unscheduled and unwelcome appearance in the form of a protuberance on the lower stomach.

After my usual amount of avoidance and procrastination and my sister the nurse’s trenchant observation that “untreated hernias cause more deaths than any other single medical thing that I intend to mention in this particular conversation,” I finally went in to have mine repaired.

This was the second time in my life that I’ve had an operation. Some years ago, I had the anterior cruciate ligament on my left knee replaced following a basketball injury. This was the first time, however, that I’d had surgery anywhere near my Groinular Region. While hernia repairs are pretty routine as surgeries go, I experienced a fair amount of trepidation about it.

I couldn’t help but remember the time in high school my friend Reuben accidentally shot himself in his scrotum with a bottle rocket. Reuben, who had a scrotum strong as crucible steel, said it hurt really bad, and it was weeks before I could bring myself to launch another bottle rocket, and only then after first engineering some strategic reinforcement to the front of my Levies.

The operation took about two hours. The recovery took a bit longer. At least, it seemed longer. I missed a couple days of work and spent most of that time applying a succession of ice packs to my Groinular Region, an activity that has its own recovery time, if you get my drift.

As I sat in the recovery room sipping juice and munching on post-surgery crackers, I realized that on floors above and below me people were undergoing more serious operations, battling various forms of cancer and other life-threatening diseases, and enduring all manner of medical calamity.

I felt both lucky and grateful to be dealing with such a minor medical matter and also weirdly connected to everyone else in the hospital, sort of a Brotherhood of the Open-Backed Hospital Gown kind of thing. I also sensed the presence of the many poor souls who came through those same front doors of the hospital but never left.

The veil between this world and the next feels exceedingly thin sometimes. Maybe it just takes being in the right place and having the right soundtrack to see it.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classic’s File.”