Takes a licking and still keeps on ticking…

Today is the fifth anniversary of my open heart surgery to replace a bad heart valve that I was born with but had not given me any trouble until about a year before I had the procedure done.

I’m glad to stay it’s still working well and I feel very healthy for a guy my age. Yes, I have a few more aches and pains that have cropped up, and manual chores like mowing lawns in the hot summer are a bit more difficult. But overall, I think I’m doing pretty well and am thankful for that.

One thing that I discovered during my most recent routine semi-annual checkup is that the valve that replaced my failing one was from a cow, not a pig as I had been led to believe. I think I mentioned this in a previous blog, saying I was more prone to mooing than oinking when things get difficult.

It’s easy to remember the date of my surgery because it was just five days after the mass shooting in a Wal-Mart in El Paso, TX, which left 23 people dead. My ordeal was over quickly. The Wal-Mart shooter’s legal case dragged on for several years before he was finally sentenced to 90 years in prison for each death.

I also remember the phrase “takes a licking and keeps on ticking” from the old Timex watch commercials years ago and think of my heart as an example of that durability. I specifically remember a TV cop show in which a man’s arm was severed in some kind of criminal act. When two investigators showed up, they found a wristwatch attached to the arm still working. One of the investigators glibly used the “keeps on ticking” phrase to amuse his partner but was immediately placed on probation for his insensitivity.

I also recall an incident with my father and a man he employed at our newspaper who was both mentally and physically challenged. His name was Cecil and he was a dedicated and hard worker that I’m proud that my father had given an opportunity for employment.

My father was driving down our main street one day with Cecil in the passenger seat and me in the back when my dad noticed that his cheap Timex watch had stopped working. He took it off his wrist and casually threw it into the street as he continued to drive. Cecil was stunned and didn’t quite understand why my father had tossed what he thought must have been a perfectly good timepiece. My father quickly realized he might have made a mistake in playing on Cecil’s inability to understand the situation. We stopped and my father explained what happened. Cecil seemed to get the joke and laughed. But I’ll bet he never bought a Timex watch after that.

And in another milestone of sorts, my records on WordPress show that I have now written 450 blogs over the past several years.

I do it because writing is a kind of therapy for me. I hope people read and enjoy what I write, but I also find it to be a mind-stimulating kind of exercise to relay what I think are interesting stories and put the proper words together to make them appeal to my readers.

I’ll always remember a comment by a former journalist college. He compared writing to a craft:

“You just nail words together to tell the story,” he said.

Yes, it’s that, but a lot more for me.