The Heart of the Matter

So, yeah, and my new pacemaker is a lot of fun, I mean it. First of all and according to the picture in the Walgreen's catalogue, it’s lemon yellow so I wore lime boxers with bright little lemons all over them on the day of the procedure to sort of celebrate and create good karma as well as some decent dharma, if you can imagine that. No, and the guy who my crazy cardiologist got to design the thing—his name is Rhino Ragnard, somehow, don’t know how he got that name—used to be a roadie for The New Christie Minstrels and then he became a studio engineer and went on to work for the Beastie Boys before he joined a polka club in Shackamaxon—that’s Fishtown, right, that's in Philly—and started playing the tuba.

And plus, so, yeah, he designed my happy little pacemaker to do different rhythms inside the heart. There’s polka, of course, and the samba, the cha-cha-cha, the waltz for my Old Fogie moods, even a soft shoe. There are two leads, so guess what? Sometimes there are two rhythms going at the same time, like a little sort of modernist counterpoint thing going on right in my heart.

Speaking of which, guess what? If I might ever be in a kind of really long-in-the-tooth super serious mood, and I totally doubt that, there’s even some Bach or Mozart—no Beethoven, though, except for the quieter parts of the Ode To Joy.

I’ve been dancing and shimmying like a mad man ever since the implantation thingy—the procedure and all—and my heart loves it!

Here’s a limerick in celebration of modern cardio-engineering:

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

—for Anne and Nancy Wilson

The heart’s a miraculous muscle,

‘spec’lly when doing The Hustle.

Those deft engineers

keep you dancing for years

right down to your last pulsing corpuscle!