Love and the Ascending Aorta

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Love and the Ascending Aorta

The other day I saw some pink ladies advertising along a street. They were waving signs, one of which read something to the effect of “If You (heart) (puerile slang for a certain body part), Donate!”

What times we live in, when grown women employ in public the vocabulary of the junior-high locker room.

Let us, for the sake of the gentle readership of this excellent newspaper, say that the endangered body part was the ascending aorta. It wasn’t, of course, and naughty little boys don’t snicker and giggle at slang expressions about the ascending aorta. One does not hear “Wow, think what her ascending aorta must be like – man, I can almost palpate the palpitations of her atrial fibrillation now!”

“Yeah, dude, her ascending aorta, like, y’know, gets me so into ventrical tachycardia!”

However, for the sake of discussion let the ascending aorta serve as our Maltese Chickadee.

No one is as supportive of ascending aortas as I. Sometimes friends and even strangers approach me to ask what I think of ascending aortas, and I always express my enthusiastic approbation. Ascending aortas are nifty, and I think everyone ought to have one or two of them. I’m even thinking of sporting a little lapel pin, a tiny little ascending aorta with a happy face.

However, no appeals for money have ever been the sequelae to conversations I’ve had with folks – and I know you have too – about merry little ascending aortas: “You like healthy ascending aortas, Mr. H? Why, so do I. Give me some money and I’ll see to it that there are healthier ascending aortas in the world.”

In sum and in short and all in all and at the end of the day the bottom line is that when the skinny lady sings I see no reason to stop my car in a busy street in order to give money to complete strangers, no matter how pink they are, simply because they maintain that this act will somehow make the world a better place for ascending aortas.

Who says my dollar will provide a meal or something for an ascending aorta? Who? If someone gives money, someone is receiving money. And who is that receiver? Is there some starving, bespectacled scientist down to his last test-tube and his last packet of Ramen noodles in some FEMA trailer laboratory, a starving, bespectacled scientist just on the cuspidor or bicuspid or something of discovering a cure for honey-glazed ascending aortas, a starving, bespectacled scientist to whom the beggars will happily fly at the end of the day with their salvific buckets of healing money for the rectification of faulty ascending aortas?

Another question is this: when did we become a nation of beggars?

The ascending aorta ladies were begging perhaps up the road from the safe-graduation beggars (because, as we all know, putting young people into the street is so safe for them, and having them beg teaches them such valuable life-lessons) and maybe down the road from the send-my-something-team-to-the-state-championship-something-playoffs-in-some-other-city beggars.

Once upon a time, in a quaint ye olde USA when the world trembled at the might of our washers and dryers, Boy Scouts washed one’s windshield for quarters safely off the road, cheerleaders washed the rest of the car safely in a church parking lot, the Sunday school / CCD class safely peddled homemade cakes after church / Mass, and the marching band sold muffins safely in front of the grocery store. The Boy Scouts might have scratched the car’s windshield, the cheerleaders might have scratched the car’s paint, the band’s muffins might have scratched the lining of one’s stomach, and the Sunday school / CCD cakes – well, actually, those were quite good -- but the point is that the young’uns’ parents and sponsors required their charges to practice work, not beggary.

More importantly, parents taught their children to stay away from the street lest they get run over or abducted. You might say those parents had a heart, ascending aorta and all.

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