Let’s discard the word “recovery” to describe my present condition. The better word is “active” as in “fully active” or “more fully active” than I was before I knew I was in trouble. Medical people advise me that I won’t recover. One recovers from a fracture or flu. From a genetic condition there is no escape, only management.

While all this has surprised “skinny” me and my wide-eyed friends, it was a gift. Compared to other dreadful conditions, my heart surgery was a ride in the park. I write about the ride, the park, and how the village gives the process a meaning larger than survival. When Garrison Keillor reads notes from his audience, applause happens around survival issues: Iraq, cancer, marriages that continue. The community is happy.

There were no symptoms, no pain. I’ve been active for years, in fact, I folk dance and commute on a bicycle. With aging I expect decline, a quiet life around writing, friends and gardening. Not owning a car was my embrace of that future. I fancied biking my way to health, but aerobic physical activity is itself not a solution.

Which is something I remember from the last days of Father Bob Draeger, a friend who prided himself on his treadmill, his blood pressure counts, his pulse, but cheerily smoking his way to lung cancer. He had calculated his overall health was a bit of a license to ignore the Surgeon General. I had made the same gamble - not cigarettes but arterial sclerosis was creeping into my well crafted future. The voice in my head who, I thought, was laughing at smokers was my better angel laughing at me, at us, at the human desire to add a few years: Survival is temporary. Leave behind something worth remembering, Bill, but, please, not how you saved your butt.

In our short space we have the power to dream big. Even our star will die and all our libraries and digital records will be smoke. Make your story worthy of the ending - how there was an intelligent life form in the Milky Way that raised evolution to the heights of love. A story that survives our star.

I hope the extra years I may spend are worthy of this ideal.

Next: Telling the Story Out Loud

“There were no symptoms, no pain. I’ve been active for years, in fact…”

Gratefully