Not If I See You First

I blistered my arms and abs in the gym, did a few planks, played around with single-arm pullups on the offset machine (I still have to counterbalance more than half bodyweight on that, drat) and ran errands on my way home. I don’t actually like cake and its general extended family, but I will go a good stinky cheese or a pretty chatchka as a birthday treat.

There is a chain import shop next to the Trader Joe’s where I usually shop. I parked at the far end of the lot, trying to avoid some infestation of fund-our-cause panhandlers that was circulating with milk crates and righteous, earnest expressions. That meant I came up behind, instead of intersecting with, a long, skinny drink of water in stovepipe jeans with a red jacket and a pronounced limp.

My former candidate for office — the one whose campaign I managed, but whose ingratitude upon finding himself in the caricatured cast of my a-clef mysteries has now reached haptic proportions — limps like that. Pronounced, and distinctive. A drop of the right hip as the foot strikes on that side, owing to a knee rearranged by the bulkhead of a Huey in Vietnam. The left hip rolling up and forward, the shoulder above it higher to compensate. Not enough to constitute a lurch, more of a deck-gait on a choppy sea, but not something you see often.

The head of gray hair was right. I thought for a moment about the jacket. The guy had a positive zest for the shabby and unstylish, and I don’t think I ever saw him in anything other but leather brown and blue-jean tatter, except when he had to suit up for debates. As a matter of fact, he bought all his suits and dress shirts in thrift shops: “I just wait for some rich lawyer my size to kick the bucket, you can tell when the family’s brought in a whole wardrobe,” he would say with an unholy light of ghoulish parsimony in his eye.

Well, if he got it for his birthday or found the right weight and style in a thrift shop, maybe the cheap bastard would wear a red jacket.

I erred on the side of caution. Pier 1 is full of breakables, and the last time I crossed the guy’s path, he shouted profanities at me and seemed to be saying that I had gotten him into trouble with the TSA. It could have been some skinny older woman with a short no-nonsense haircut and an artificial hip, but I didn’t need chatchkas that much, and I wanted to quit on birthday surprises while I was ahead, and TJ’s does have Saint-Andre.

I was wondering if the town was really not big enough for the two of us until I realized we were in the next county over, anyway. The distraction meant that the panhandlers waylaid me and I had to get snarky.

Oh well.

Sister Age (II)

Today I am fifty-five, and as I pledged to do some months back, I am shortly going to be marching into the nearby bargain department store, where I tend to stop for sundries on the way to the gym, to demand my senior discount.

I’m dressed to work out, in leopard-print workout baggies and black strappy tank. I think perhaps the first thing I buy with the discount will be something involving Spandex, but we’ll see what they have.

A couple of days ago I got Leo, who is around seventy, trying a new ab exercise I adopted: you load two 45-pound plates on an Olympic bar and use it for an ab wheel, bending straight from the hips to grasp the bar and rolling it forward until your body is extended in a full plank, then retract, repeat until blown out. I’ve been going about fifteen on the first set, Leo fell on his knees on the second but quickly rebounded. Leo has a training buddy who looks about 35; he declined the attempt.

Nyah!

And, to make things absolutely terrific, I got “Skyped” all the way from Spain by Azahar!!! My Bengal cat even said hello to her from the bathroom window sill!!!

The only thing that could be a problem is those birthday spanks. Fifty-five. I have been training my 39-year-old engineer friend on the bench press, and it’s the one lift where he can now blow ahead of me by about fifteen pounds, but I think his arm is going to get tired.

Limericks

For no reason except that I have some old favorites, which I suspect do not see the light of day often enough. These mostly trace back to the Complete Immortalia of Gershon Legman and a collection by W. S. Baring-Gould.

From the crypt of the church at St. Giles
Came a scream that re-echoed for miles.
Said the sexton, “Good gracious!
Has Father Ignatius
Forgotten the Bishop has piles?”

I find that, as I do the one that follows, almost unbearably poignant.

There was a young lady named Gloria
Who was raped by Sir Gerald du Maurier,
And then by six men,
Sir Gerald (again),
And the band at the Waldorf-Astoria.

(History does not record what Sir Gerald du Maurier, a renowned stage actor in his time, might have had to say about this, but such is the curse of being a public figure. He was reputedly an understated actor, hence, perhaps, the large supporting cast. For me, it is the presence of the band that gives the limerick its evocative quality. I envision them all standing in a sedate queue, holding their instruments. The musical ones.)

Somewhat continuous with the theme of the first is this:

A monk in an abbey in Syria
Grew steadily eerier and eerier,
Till he burst from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And buggered the Father Superior.

This evokes a Rasputin-like image, loud and shaggy and far from the vision of sedate academic sodomy contained in the last:

There was a young man at St. John’s
Who wanted to bugger the swans.
But the loyal hall porter
Said, “Sir, take my daughter;
Them birds is reserved for the dons.”

You can tell that years of classical scholarship could have a debauching effect. Still, it would be justice for Leda.

In these days of rap and other such coarse jabber, I find refuge in this sort of polished crudity. If that is not an oxymoron.

Torque

I have encountered nearly every musculoskeletal overuse syndrome there is, if not self-inflicted then reported by my clients, but I have now surpassed myself by spraining a tooth.

I thought I was pushing the envelope when my tailbone locked up or when my first year of practice gave me bony exostoses — they looked like dew claws — on either wrist (they were on the thumb side and cleared up when the nearby tendons toughened up a little; everyone was in a panic but me).

This was a new one. Life has just been aggravating of late and I have responded with some balls-to-the-wall workouts, which doesn’t just blow off steam but puts it to positive use. Alas, I noticed a few weeks ago that I was clamping my jaws hard, as if trying to tear someone’s throat out (I probably was on some unconscious level) every time I hit the squat rack or leg curl machine, not to mention driving down the road. Sure enough not only did my masseter seize hard on that side but the rear molar — it has about a four year old crown on it — started feeling pretty exactly like the big toe joint that I bent back double falling over the garden hose a couple of months back, the day after I dropped the hack sled on myself.

Sometimes it does seem I live a high-impact life.

Worse, for about twenty-four hours I couldn’t drink hot tea, because the tooth was so histrionically sensitive that I was actually stomping my feet on the floor and Lamaze breathing over a slug of freshly brewed Darjeeling. This is a fate worse than death in Sled land (I know children are starving in Asia, but we are back to teeth, redheads and Dr. Szell, okay?) Tea is what makes life bearable. If it’s going to make me feel as if someone has exploded an M-80 in my mouth, the end of the world has come.

I killed trigger points in my face that felt like wads of dried gum, hosed out my sinuses with hot salt water and Thieves’ Oil, and dragooned a colleague to work on me. The tea problem got better.

“Looks like you sprained your tooth,” said my hygienist. “The roots are retained by four small ligaments, okay? Chewing is torque force and when you really bear down, it can twist them just like twisting your ankle. I was worried until you told me it was already getting better. Just call if it keeps bothering you.”

This is why I rarely take acute problems to a doctor without waiting to see how they develop, unless it really looks like I might collapse on the spot. I probably escaped being scheduled for a root canal or subjected to several expensive X rays.

Dentists and chiropractors always ask, by the way, if I grind my teeth at night. Crap. I grind them in broad daylight — just being in earshot of my neighbors is enough to get me going. At night I am more likely to be gasping open-mouthed for air because my nose is stuffed and wake up with a mouth like a twist of dry rawhide. I am the aficionado of humidifiers. But apparently day tripping was enough to do it.

Around 300 psi, I think it says in one of my textbooks.

I know, I’m supposed to think beautiful thoughts and say “Om” more regularly.

Balls. I’ve been biting my towel in the gym. It looks funny but it’s easier to wash than a leather strap.

Auden

Sometimes I enjoy the pleasure of an unhurried supper with a book beside me; it’s one of the perks of living alone. Tonight, for some reason, I decided I ought to read a random poem by W. H. Auden. Reckless, because Auden, while often contemplative or addicted to mandarin usages like “baltering,” has a knack for making me howl like a dog.

The news briefs, laden with sound bites about Afghanistan, came round on the hour as I opened the book blind to The Shield of Achilles.

  She looked over his shoulder
   	   For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
   	   And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
   	   His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
   	   And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
   	   For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
   	   Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
   	   Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
   	   Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
   	   For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
   	   Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
   	   But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
   	   But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
   	   Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
   	   Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
   	   To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
   	   Who would not live long.

Auden is one of the few people I can forgive for doing that to me during supper.

I raised a glass to him.

Little Sled

My father’s widow, the Serpent Woman, has been cleaning out his desk and file cabinet. His desk drawers were stuffed to bursting even when I knew him, and I guess it didn’t get any better. There was a sizable photo album from about 1959.

I seem to have had an innate fondness for the pose odalisque.

A Boy And His Bog

Yes, that kind of bog: for those of the non-UK persuasion, the restroom, the little boys’ room, the john.

There was something about my Brit ex-fiance that not only our relationship but his mind never seemed to get out of the lavatory, resulting in the kind of jokes that are funny the first time and mislead you into thinking a person has an amusing rough side when he is really just a case of arrested development. He got points for creativity though.

One day over the transatlantic cable he told me how he had been having some sort of phone conversation about aquatic life and the subject of dogfish came up. His interlocutor, mishearing a dental as a labial, said “What’s a bogfish?” And, he said, “…I thought, well, what do you find swimming around in the bog — if you’re not careful?”

It was funny the first few times he said “Bogfish!” instead of “Shite!” but then he sort of turned it into a religion (supposedly the bogfish were all going to rise against their oppressors and cause chaos by clogging the plumbing and it was the Coming Peril; well, Britain hasn’t had a good plumber since the Romans left) and he wrote an anthem and everything, and having an invincible musical bent I found myself humming a spirited march tune to go with the lines and to this day the phantom piccolo riffs and brass columns come back to haunt me.

You bogfish of the world, UNITE!
Fight the good fight with all your might!
Rise up! rise up! Don’t be a load of shite!

Bogfish unite! Don’t loaf there in the can,
Come forth to meet your destiny,
Rise up and hit the fan…

This is what happens when a person lives too close to the flight-path from Heathrow, I think. I can’t even reconstruct what I saw in him anymore but that damn tune runs in my head.

I hope he found true love with someone.

Butt Woman (IV): or, No Pressure

I was in the gym next to the sled press I love so dearly, doing the Plough pose as part of my warmup and stretch, something I do with my glasses off because right before that I usually do a back bridge with my weight on my feet and forehead. So I was blind with my butt uppermost when one of the gym owners loomed into my hazy field of view and said “I need to talk to you.”

What the fuck did I do now? I thought, imagining this was the moment when someone would brace me for grunting or hanging upside down by my insteps.

“My back is killing me,” he says. This is the Purple Camo Guy.

So I booked him. Of course the problem turned out to be in his butt.

I can’t get away from it.

Alma Mahler, or, Falling Short Of Ideals

Every so often I catch myself reviewing my credentials as a femme d’un certain age with a checkered past and wish I had executed certain turns with more polish. It is funny how when you are past fifty you can be said to have a history, yet when you cast your mind back, mostly what you see is dumbshit predicaments. I have dated a guy who could neck while playing the Goldberg Variations, one who produced  an annotated edition of the Oera Linda Book, one who owned two businesses by the time he was twenty-six. I have been married to a man who could go toe to toe with eminent musicologists in the matter of identifying obscure pieces. But somehow, I end up in places like a midnight showing of the Mad Max movies with one of them on each side of me, grimly sticking it out to the last credits rather than go home and leave me with the other.

Once during the five years I dated my Albino Ex — the summer of 2000, it was — we found ourselves arranging to see the National Mall fireworks on July 4 with the Goldberg Variation guy, who still lives around here and had crossed our paths at the County Fair the year before. He was married by then (though, come to find out, his wife was out of town). Their addresses turned out to be a short walk apart, so the Albino Ex and I hoofed over to pick up Goldberg Guy, who in turn lived only a quick saunter from a popular viewpoint on the Virginia side of the river.

Because the July evening was breathlessly hot, convection currents billowing up from the baked sidewalks, Albino Ex, who tends to sweat freely, tied a bandanna around his head. He looked like a cross between the Man From Glad and Rambo, especially when — thinking like the ex-cop he is — he loaded his cargo pants with an emergency-channel scanner, a pepper spray, and a leaded sap, in case anyone in the crowd made trouble. There was already some concern about terrorism, one of the reasons I absolutely vetoed actually going downtown, so the channel scanner struck even me as prudent.

Goldberg Guy, who was always so cheap he squeaked, was trying to get by without air conditioning and sitting on his porch in a liberally perforated strappy men’s A-shirt, looking like an old fart in training. (He was always a very pretty boy, with a lush head of wavy blue-black hair and flawless dusky skin, about 5′7″ and 120 dripping wet, but he had this invincible Inner Old Fart always screaming to get out, and would wear plaid pants and shirts of a color not found in nature, with the cuffs frayed off.) I was rapidly draining my water bottle in the heat and when I suggested he bring one of his own, we discovered he didn’t own any such receptacle. He cast about the kitchen, found a pitcher and filled it up, proposing to carry it open all the way to the vantage point a mile off. Off we went, an odd parade, me in my running gear, the Albino Ex with his pants crackling out police calls, and Goldberg Guy walking along behind us holding his pitcher, like Ganymede on a constrained budget.

We got halfway down the hill to the best point of view, surrounded by teenagers, families with strollers, and obese couples in beach chairs, when the Albino Ex put his foot in a gopher hole and went sprawling, the scanner going one way and the sap another. “Sabotage!” he snarled. “Fuck you, Osama bin Laden, you’re going to have to do better than that!” (It took a while after 9/11 before we were able to laugh about this.) Goldberg Guy stood there with his pitcher pretending he didn’t know the guy in the Rambo bandanna. I pretended I didn’t know either of them.

I have known interesting, not to mention talented, guys, but there are times when I feel like Alma Mahler as played by Flip Wilson.

Epidemic Of Fat Dumb Young Crooks Crashes Combat Readiness

Well, I saw this coming.

Fifty years ago Adelle Davis pointed to the cholesterol plaques in ther arteries of young men killed in Korea (I don’t mean personally with a pointer or anything, but she referenced the matter in one of her books) and predicted an increasingly unfit America whose kids would be ever sicker and more sluggish the more agribusiness-manufactured crap they ate.

We be here.

People 17-24 seeking to enlist are being rejected in record numbers because they’re obese, can’t pass the military entrance exam or have been convicted of a violent crime. (Since British studies have raised student test scores and reduced violence in the prison population by mandating an enhanced prison diet, we can also infer that eating crap makes you act crappy.)

There are some folks who still bag on Davis as a quack, mostly on the strength of cases where people carried some of her recommendations to bizarre lengths (after recommending blackstrap molasses as a source of iron, she once encountered a kid whose teeth were decayed to the gum line because his parents had been feeding it to him from a spoon in prodigious, daily quantities). Since I have fixed myself with her advice when doctors could not, my tendency is to say tu quoque, considering how long it has taken the medical faculty to notice that it matters what you eat and considering how many people get killed by their prescriptions. It’s a caveat emptor world out there.

But failed exams and physically useless 20-year-olds are hard to talk your way around. Is there some higher court that will rule on the culpability of feeding sugar to kids in licensed-character boxes and cups till they get dumb and burst their jeans?