mysteries: a mystery of the heart My love of mysteries started with The Bobbsey Twins, then Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, later Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, to Le Carré and Daniel Silva. I think of Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven that I read in the early days of the pandemic. Looking up how to spell her name, I am delighted to find out Emily wrote Last Night in Montreal . I immediately put in a hold request from the library. Before the internet, as a freelance researcher-writer I haunted the National Library and Archives of Canada for the references and microfiche records of everything written in Canada and beyond. I knew the rules and the system, and I found a treasure. I brought my father in to see his father’s World War I records as a Canadian Seaforth Highlander. Included in the small box with David M. Watson’s signature were notes by his commanding officer about my gentle grandfather being disciplined for unsanctioned boxing – for money – in a local village overseas. Why a mystery fascinates is in itself a mystery. For me, research is like being on the trail. I follow clues, jump over red herrings, double back for that dropped hint, and when it’s a good search, I remain engrossed, almost feverish in pursuit of answers. · As I awaited open-heart surgery for a serious birth defect in the years between 2012 and 2017, like Sherlock Holmes, I dove into the complex, mysterious subject of why and how the heart works and what might lie in my future. I brought together a cluster of resources that fit into the bedroom epilogue Today, like my heart, my love of books is stronger than ever. I sit cross-legged on my bed, surrounded by books pulled from the bookcase and spilled/piled beside the bed, books that together weave many versions of a story into a whole. While I have returned the heart books to their shelves, I am ready to dive into endless new literary and research journeys.
bookshelf and cascaded out into a pile by my bed where I could drop them as I fell asleep at night. In the pile of heart books, a picture book of the body was the biggest. I loved the photographic realism showing each organ and connective tissue. And the crinkly sound as I pulled each cellophane layer across the other, superimposing different systems against the background of the human body. This picture book was at the bottom of the stack closest to the floor, a pedestal for the others, fending off the Roomba vacuum cleaner on its daily rounds. Above the anatomy book was Adam Pick’s heartfelt story and resource book – The Patient’s Guide to Open Heart Surgery , which I got my husband to read cover to cover. (He was still surprised at the process, but says he is ready for the next time.) During those years, I kept Gail Godwin’s hardcover meditation Heart: a personal journey through its myths and meanings in that pile of biology and heart surgery books. From Heart I learned about the musical tempo of the heartbeat. “The Italians have a musical notation not found in any other language: tempo giusto ‘the right tempo.’ It means a steady, normal beat, between 66 and 76 on the metronome. Tempo giusto is the appropriate beat of the human heart.” After recovering from surgery, I felt one more mystery in life was solved – how to survive. After years of consulting biology textbooks and tomes about dying and dealing with uncertainty, I returned the books to their bookshelves, along with my journals about the experience. Journals belong in my studio bookshelf with sketchbooks, lined up or piled in order from earliest to most recent. The notes inspire me to write my own story as a thank you to the thousands of books in my life.
I let the Heart book fall in my lap, practise breathing and feel my heart beat, at tempo giusto .
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‘Sono viva e vegeta!’ Karen Joan Watson is a Canadian writer and visual artist, former Government of Canada manager in Marketing-Communications, a traveller, family genealogist, mother’s caregiver and a defender of all that is lively. https:// kjwatson.ca Brad Snider
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