every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
my heart
duh! my life has, in a sense, been about two things: my heart and books. I never quite confused life and books, but books were where stories were, and life was more interesting in stories. in life outside of stories, we played, we ran around, we fought, we laughed, but we never ran into fairies or pixies or trolls or gremlins, not really. so books were important and I'll probably appreciate them next. but today, my heart. it's been beating for about 74 and a half years now even though I'm only 73 so far. early on, the doctor noticed that it didn't sound quite right, so he checked as soon as I was born. yep, there it was, a murmur. A murmur? like words kinda whispered but almost spoken? I don't know what it sounded like then. I didn't notice it until I was about four, when I noticed that when I was going to sleep and while I slept, soldiers marched outside. that was pretty cool! soldiers marched around our house while I went to sleep and while I slept. oops! and then I noticed that I could "hear" them too when I put my hand on my chest over my heart. hm. then after first grade, I was taken to the hospital and kept there for a week doing a bunch of silly things the doctors called tests, except I didn't get any grades that I recognized, and there was no way to prepare for the tests or to do them over and do better. ah! all the secretive-booggedy-boo was about my heart. and allegedly the results meant I couldn't be a boy any more. hunh! of course, I went along with that! no, I ran, I rode my bicycle, I climbed, I played soccer, I swam, I boyed as well as I could, but always aware of my heart. which kept on pumping and pumping, and kept on sounding weird, but no longer like soldiers. once I heard a cement mixer running with a brick inside it, and decided my heart kinda sounded like that. after we came back to this country, I learned it sounded more like a washing machine with tennis shoes in the load, or some other unbalanced load. but it kept on working despite my doing a lot of things I was told I mustn't. somehow I made it past my teens, survived my twenties and my thirties, and drifted into my seventies with that heart still beating, still sounding weird, but still beating. it still is tonight. but now you know a secret: if now and then the rhythm of one of my poems gets a little ragged, it's possibly because that's the way I've heard rhythm since before I was born!
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