March has come in like a lion … will it scamper away like a lamb? Spring is out there somewhere, babies, long experience says so.
Come on in, the water’s fine!
28 Feb 2014 8 Comments
in My Thoughts Tags: be real, brave, exercise, friendship, happy stuff, life, living, relationships
They say — and just who the hell ARE they? — that we learn something new every day if we keep our eyes and ears open. This week I learned that it’s possible to sweat underwater.
I’ve fallen in love with the pool. Not the great pee-filled paradise of my youth, but a glittering expanse of cuddly clear blue water, marked off in lanes. I am distinctly not an exercise lover but the pool has captured my heart. I love the muted sounds and the clean saltwater smell; the silky feel of the water as I slip in for laps; the sunlight shining through the ceiling panels making fog hang in the air; the way I feel wrapped in cotton, alone in my head, nothing in front of me except the lane and the goal — to stay afloat. And when class starts, I love the adorable instructors who crank the music and urge us to jump and kick and stretch and wriggle our cellulite, which they do not possess.
I love the women I meet there. Many are likely older than I am, although who knows. Some are far younger — new moms. It’s a delightful bunch because they’re honest and irreverent and hilarious. There’s a crankypants or two in class but I have to assume they’ve cultivated that for a while and aren’t likely to switch attitudes, so I leave them to their grumbling and their mad-faces and hang out with Jo and Barb and Andrea and Roxy and Pat and Sandy and assorted others who are just there to have a good time and keep moving. All of us by now have sustained losses that have shaped us. We don’t talk about it, we just know. And of course we don’t discuss body shape, because we all have parts that are surrendering to gravity, legs that are melting into our ankles, wear and tear that dictates what we can and cannot do.
We’re a motley crew — we roll out of bed and show up at the gym, grab a shower, suit up and start swimming. A lot of these gals have not only never invested in a Brazilian, they haven’t shaved their underarms since the Cold War — a very genuine and healthy practice, in my humble opinion. We wear our baby-bellies like a freakin’ badge of honor, although to be honest mine’s become a too-many-carbs belly, which is what brought me to the pool. We give it our best shot to keep up with the zero-body-fat instructor who’s winning a dance contest poolside or in the water with us every morning, and we grin and laugh and hoot when we finally find our rhythm.
In the water … nothing hurts much. There’s no temperamental low back, no rickety shoulder, and the 7 Purple Minions of Fibromyalgia are in time out. There are enough sore muscles later to let me know I used them, but that’s a good hurt and I welcome it. It’s highly motivating that women in their 70s and 80s show up for personal torture day after day, and do it with a smile. Surely I can manage at least that. I do hope it will be a longterm relationship, the pool and I. And I really hope carbs melt in saltwater.
The view from here …
09 Feb 2014 2 Comments
Watching this year’s Winter Olympics has been a unique experience for me. It fully dawned this time that rather than a contest among nations, it’s hundreds of contests between worthy opponents who have spent most of their lives preparing for the moments in which we see them. Geographically speaking, the point is not which country won which medals, but which athletes earned the title of Best. I find that I see so much more if my eyes aren’t trained solely on the American athlete in the race. It’s very moving to see how each entrant has trained his or her body — every muscle, joint, and cell — to do the chosen feat. It’s poetry. And when the color and design of a flag take a back seat to individual effort, the games emerge as what they are: an incredible sampling of humanity, a dazzling parade of young faces, bodies, and spirits — people who will never again be quite this young and beautiful and perfect, but are just wise and reckless enough to squeeze the life out of Life as they streak past. God bless the world.
You have to start somewhere …
12 Jan 2014 Leave a comment
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
— Octavia E. Butler
Every word is true …
21 Nov 2013 4 Comments
Is it Christmas yet?
08 Nov 2013 12 Comments
in My Thoughts Tags: be real, brave, learning, life, living, love, memories
Okay, so you remember when you got your first bicycle, right? Probably Christmas or your birthday and everything already felt tingly with excitement and you couldn’t wait to see what happened next and then. There.Was.The.Bike. Shiny and BIG, and instantly freedom stretched out in front of you and you could see yourself flying down the road or the street and all options were open to you. Wow. I remember mine — Santa brought it the Christmas I was five and left it in front of the tree just like he was supposed to. I don’t even remember longing for it, but there it was. Emerald green, with training wheels. And BIG. Christmas afternoon was warm. My dad helped me hop on the bike and ran along beside me, touching the handlebar every once in a while. A few trial runs and without a word he wasn’t there anymore and I was flying free!
That bicycle and I were nearly inseparable for years. I rode it a hundred miles an hour on gravel roads, did wheelies, hauled my little sibs on the handlebars, slid into home with it, and have no memory of road rash. When I went to college and then got married I left the bike in the round-top shed … and the truth is, it had been forgotten long before. When my folks cleaned out the shed for their farm sale years later, there it was. Rusty. Battered and bent. And so small! Oh memory, you are such a lying mistress.
Fast-forward. When Kim and I decided to move to Lawrence we knew we wanted bicycles. His is graphite-colored and sleek. Mine is lime green and cute. I dreamed about it — buying it, choosing accessories for it, riding it around the neighborhood and on the trails. The day we picked them up at the bicycle shop a block away, Kim zipped back to our parking lot on his, maddeningly confident. I rode mine a few feet but felt shaky so got off and walked it the rest of the way. He suggested a few trial runs in the lot, just to refresh our muscle memories, and that was going great until it wasn’t. DISCLAIMER: My sisters and John should probably stop reading right about …. HERE.
Without warning Judy and her cute lime green bicycle were on the pavement and there was definite road rash. I’ll spare you the details.
Fast-forward some more. After babying my normal list of aches and pains, plus the wear and tear of moving, and the humbling effects of falling on my face and other body parts, we decided that this was THE MORNING. Time to get back on that horse and ride. I wore the right clothes and shoes, strapped on my fierce-looking lime-green & black helmet and prepared for battle. I was doing fine right up until the part where I got killed. We rode for a half-hour or so, from one end of the parking garage to the other. No traffic to watch for, just stationary objects like vehicles and cement pillars and such. I was getting smooth on the straightaways … still shaky on the turns … but hopeful. And then I was down. Road rash. Anger. Total humiliation. Instant discouragement.
Kim brought me upstairs and plunked me in the spa tub to soak the hurts out, and we talked. And I remembered something — my equilibrium hasn’t been kosher since a little incident with a ruptured cranial aneurysm, three bleeds, and major repairs. Or is it just in my DNA? My grandma and my dad had some horrendous falls … and so have I. But … only since that head thing, so yeah, maybe so. Damn. I’m still young. This is not fair.
Okay, so first you cry.
And then you pick yourself up, dry yourself off, and get on with it. I’m really not up for any more scrapes and bruises — my knuckles look like I’ve been in a bar fight, or so said the man in the bathtub with me — and I have other health realities to consider, so …
I’ve been online today checking out snarky-looking three-wheel bikes. Oh lord, the lowering of expectations. But never let it be said that I give up easily! I want that freedom. The sun. The air. The exercise. It’s easy to give up riding a hundred miles an hour, or sliding like a little banshee in the driveway gravel, or God forbid, popping wheelies. Not so easy to give up the sense of being a person who does everything, handles everything, lives life unafraid.
I was a caregiver for about sixteen years altogether for older people in my family whom I loved very much. It made my heart ache to watch them give up, one by one, the things that brought sparkle to their days. If I could take today’s wiser self back there now, I’d be oh so much more gentle … patient … so much more careful with their dignity. They could still see themselves doing all the things they ever did, and it was a real thing. Their occasional belligerance in the face of reality was inevitable. I get it.
I’ll still live my life unafraid, no matter what — fear is a killer, it stops you in your tracks, so I’ll still find a way to do the things I really want to do … and I hope you will, too. Right now there’s a slick Candy Red 3-wheeler with a Shimano six-speed that has my name written all over it.
Life is so sweet. As I wrote what I thought would be the final sentence, I looked out my fourth-floor window and saw a little girl and her daddy rounding the corner at the intersection. He’s on a big-guy bicycle, riding beside her unbelievably tiny purple bike, her matching purple helmet shining in the sun. She’s the picture of confidence, standing on the pedals, legs pumping away. Bless you, little blond sweetheart — life is GOOD!!
Metamorphosis …
06 Nov 2013 6 Comments
in My Thoughts, Photos Tags: be real, brave, happy stuff, life, living, memories, Photos
A move to a new city seems like an opportune time for personal reinvention. Case in point, I’m tired of paying big money to have chemicals plastered on my head, so I’ve decided to go gray. Oddly enough, I’m really excited about it! I found a cute sharp-as-a-dart hairdresser here who totally gets it, and we’re having a good time taking me from roots to reality. My hair is uber short, which is liberating in itself, and after my haircut next week I just might be completely white/gray/salt-and-pepper. I take a sort of goofy pride in staying sassy, and my life has been an exercise in “hair today, gone tomorrow.”
What I did this summer …
12 Sep 2013 10 Comments
in My Thoughts Tags: be real, blogging, brave, do good, family, life, living, relationships
We’re still in the throes of a major move … but right in the middle of it we decided it was time to spend a week with our son in San Francisco. Most wonderful vacation we’ve ever had, due in part to the location, but mostly to his kindness and the joy of being with him. Following are some thoughts I wrote down while spending a beautiful afternoon in my own company …
There are thousands of homeless in the San Francisco area, some of whom have gravitated there to take advantage of the mild weather, some who have fallen on hard times since arriving or having been born there, some who have been dumped as mental patients by one facility or another (a sordid tale that breaks my heart). The stories would be as varied as the sheer numbers. They make it from day to day … or don’t. If they wake up it’s on the same park bench they fell asleep on … or in the same doorway … or in whatever hooch they can fashion for themselves. Many push and carefully guard shopping carts filled with a smelly assortment of items dear to them, if only because they found them before someone else did. Some are very bold, like the man who came into the Boudin courtyard and made a rather eloquent speech about the need for food on the part of every human, and the fact that a morsel or two would really not be all that costly. His willingness to look people in the eye and state his need earned him a bit of lunch money from this midwesterner while the tears lurked behind my eyes and I mentally reviewed the endless list of reasons why I wake up thankful and inexplicably blessed every day. If you’re thinking “What a bleeding heart,” that’s fine — it doesn’t change what I know … that as the “human” race we’re in this together, like it or not. And it isn’t always our own wise choices that buy us a decent trip through life, however much pride might whisper that in our ear. I’ve been gratified to see that the police tend to treat them with a certain gentleness and allow them their little patch of dirt or concrete. After a few days’ observation, the structure of their underground society starts to become clear. This is neither an argument for nor against dependency, just a statement of how things are. And I don’t feel in the least offended to be asked to share a pittance from the well I dip into every day without question.
A rainy day …
08 Aug 2013 2 Comments
When stress and uncertainty cloud the view, nothing helps more than rain, flowers, memories … and love. And nothing is ever really lost.
Write from where it hurts …
18 Jul 2013 4 Comments
Time to put some discipline into my days again and make my blog feel loved. Summer has stopped me in my tracks and my brain feels like a sleepy wasteland. I’m probably running from the very idea presented here …
Playing for Time 
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