Day 5037: Beloved Books & The Amazing Secretariat.

"Point of View": junk collage

                                                                       

  

Want music?

    Click: Billy Preston, My Sweet Lord.

2GN2S

Artist and friend Lorraine Merdjan Kushynski has a great track recored for recommending great reads to me. From Theo of Golden, to The Correspondent. I asked for more, and she said she was reading this quirky book that sounded good to me, so I got it.

And, I really enjoyed it. I needed a fun read, and it was all of that and more. The author even thanked me at the end if I laughed, and I did, a lot! I think I am in need of more humor to balance out where there is not enough to suit me? Lorraine also suggested ...

I wasn't won over by the title, but again, I guessed wrong. I started it last night, my newest bedtime read instead of the news, and I found it to be an exciting read, hard to stop reading. Waiting to get back to it.

Books are frozen voices, 

in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. 

The score is a way of transmitting the music to 

someone who can play it, 

releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. 

And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words 

that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. 

They lie there inert until a reader comes along and 

transforms the letters into living sounds. 

The reader is the musician of the book: 

each reader may read the same text, 

just as each violinist plays the same piece, 

but each interpretation is different.”

—Margaret Atwood

When Secretariat died in 1989, the world thought it already knew everything about the greatest racehorse who ever lived — until the necropsy cracked open a secret that science still struggles to explain. What veterinarians found inside his chest didn't just rewrite the record books. It redefined what a living heart is capable of.

His heart weighed an estimated 22 pounds — nearly two and a half times the size of a normal Thoroughbred's. But here's what made the room go silent: it wasn't diseased. It wasn't swollen from stress or strain. It was perfect. Every chamber balanced. Every wall strong. An anatomical masterpiece shaped by nature's own hand, as if the universe had decided one horse deserved something more.

That massive engine pumped oxygen-rich blood with unmatched efficiency, feeding muscles that simply refused to tire. At full speed, his heart could circulate his entire blood volume twice in a single minute — a biological impossibility walking around on four legs. His stride, measured at nearly 25 feet, wasn't just athletic. It was the outward expression of an interior force no trainer, no jockey, no camera had ever truly seen.

And that's exactly why he didn't just win races — he *swallowed* them whole. He accelerated when every other horse faltered. He expanded his lead as if gravity had loosened its grip. Watching Secretariat run wasn't just watching a race — it was watching something bend the rules of what's physically real.

But what makes this discovery land so hard isn't the biology. It's what the biology *means*.

That colossal heart was never just muscle. It was the answer to a question fans had been asking for decades — *what was that feeling?* That overwhelming sense, watching him run, that something greater was operating behind those eyes. Something immeasurable. Something that belonged more to legend than to livestock.

As one veterinarian whispered after the necropsy, *"We finally know what powered him… but we'll never understand how much heart he truly had."*

In life, Secretariat's heart carried him 31 lengths past history. In death, it sent one last message to the world: that the greatest things are never fully visible from the outside. That what separates the extraordinary from the ordinary isn't always technique, or training, or timing — sometimes it's simply the size of the heart beating behind it all.

So the next time someone tells you greatness is measured in what the world can see — remember the horse whose most defining feature was hidden inside his chest his entire life.

 

  

 

A 3 minute video,  Alexa for Sr's. here.

 

 

Just because ...

Whooping Crane

Whooping Cranes are the tallest birds in North America. They stand at nearly 5 feet tall and their wingspans can reach up to 7 feet across!

Tuesday's Smiles ... 

 

Hoping you see all the good things in your day.