Hearts

My Dad is in the hospital because it seemed that he had a stroke.  Actually he hadn't,  but tests turned up that he had had one in the last few months so he was kept for observation.   I watched the echo-cardiogram technician as he looked at images of his beating heart.  It is so sloppy, organic and weird,  how did we ever get to the common visual vernacular for the heart?

 I have molded the common heart shape in my hands, and it does seem a very natural shape to form, make a circle, divide the top into two halves.   But it is not natural when compared to what the heart looks like in reality.  Maybe the four chambers of the heart in cross section look a little like the accepted heart shape, or Mickey Mouse, I'm not sure.

That night we went to see a movie "Beginners", a great movie in that it made you laugh, cry and think, but not so great a choice in that it dealt with the death of a father.  But as we stood purchasing our tickets a piece of paper taped to the wall caught my eye:

It was a message that it had been a bad day for other people besides me, and it's always good to be reminded of that.