Harder than I thought...

“Even when all is known, the cure of a man is not

yet complete...he must also take exercise…”

- Hippocrates: Regimen

Molly had been asking me with the regularity of the rising sun to come to her exercise classes.  My consistent, “Thanks hon, probably not this time,” responses did NOT deter her from continuing to ‘…drip water on the roughened stone of my mind…’

Other than group yoga, which we did for two or three years in Detroit, I have avoided group exercise programs – I just don’t like ‘em.  I bike and lift weights pretty regularly and swim a little less frequently than in the past, so I’m thinking in the delicacy of my late 60s, I’m doing plenty!

PLUS…there are all those people!!!

This last year, however, I joined the YMCA Board of Managers.  Tony, our new executive director, has brought an infectious enthusiasm to an already pretty successful center.

I thought,

You know, if I am on this board, I should probably sample the classes and get a feel for the products we deliver.

After all, I’m in pretty good shape for a ‘non-competitive’ guy my age.

“Molly,” I said.  “Since I’m on the board, I’m thinking about taking a few group exercise classes. Where do you think I should begin?”

Hardly suppressing her enthusiasm at my proactive request, she suggested I try the ‘Silver Sneakers Cardio’ and the ‘50+ Boot camp’ classes – it just so happens she is in both of them!

Sure, I thought, I can do that AND kill two birds with one stone…see what the classes are like and satisfy Molly’s long standing appetite to get me into group exercise sessions. You know what they say, “Gratification delayed can be so much sweeter,” and at this “…finally he’s doing it…” request to her, she was feeling pretty sweet!!

Silver Sneakers…

When the studio doors opened, 30 hardy, and well past middle aged souls trickled into the room. They knew the drill – pick up the hand weights, rubber bands with handles and small 6 inch in diameter balls.  My ‘guide’ – that would be Molly – shuttled me through the ‘getting ready process’ and we were ready to go.

I looked around, checking out the competition, thinking to myself,

Everyone in here, with few exceptions, is my age or older.  I can do this!

The leader ‘Natalie’ wandered to the front of the class.  In my most enlightened, anti-misogynist frame of mind, I saw a ‘soft around the edges’ woman in her late forties to early fifties with a “I have had my kids, and this time is for me” look. 

She paused for a moment, then as the energetic music started, she began exhorting the group, and for the next 50 minutes, with two or three short water breaks, it was ‘Katy bar the door’ non-stop activity.

When we were finished…I was DONE!!  More than that, I was done and humbled at the fitness levels of these tired looking old people!  Worse, Molly looked like she was just getting going.

Damn!  I thought. Tomorrow has got to be a better day!

50s+ Boot camp…

We arrived at the door to this studio a little before 7am where there were four or so older women quietly chatting.

I noted that Shelley was there.  Molly had introduced me to her before…a 59 year-old woman with a big boned body.  I had seen her lifting in the weight room, and after watching her work out, there is little doubt I would want her on my team – no matter what the game might be!

Blanca (our leader) arrived a little before the appointed time to open the doors and get things ready.  While the Silver Sneakers class is apparently the same every day, it is not so for the Boot camp.  Here, the small groups of folk, gather around a white dry erase board to find out what the day will bring.

We single filed through the equipment room picking up hand weights and a Bosu ball – a large ball cut in half with a hard plastic bottom and an inflated soft-topped half ball.  It is used for balancing and core exercise activities.

Blanca, an animated deceptively fit woman in her fifties, headed to the front of the room, and like the day before, “…She paused for a moment as the energetic music began and for the next 50 minutes, with two or three short water breaks, it was ‘Katy bar the door’ non-stop activity...”

For comparative purposes, Natalie was like a Protestant minister in most mainstream churches, whereas Bianca was the Evangelical, Pentecostal exhorter of the less than lively sheep under her early morning ministery.

Natalie had command of her class, Blanca ‘owned’ hers.

As she wandered around the studio she encouraged and exhorted those aging bodies.

“Come on, keep those heads up when you are doing pushups!” 

“Hey, are you looking for buried treasure on the floor? If you find it let me know!”

“Woo!!”

“That’s it keep going.”  “How does it feel?”

“If it is too much, modify your activity!”

She knew everyone’s name and seemed to have a connection with every person in the room.

When it was over, I thought…

Damn!! Today was NOT better! 

Worse…Molly, as the day before, seemed refreshed when we were done.

I will continue to take these classes and some others the Y offers, as part of trying to gain a better understanding what we do and how we do it.  There is little doubt I will get into better shape than I am already in…or that I am NOT in…

The only problem I foresee is that Molly might find something else she thinks will benefit the quality of my life…

- ted

Laughing Coyotes...

"Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism…and to the

‘good life,’ whatever it is and wherever it happens.”

- Hunter Thompson: The Proud Highway:

Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

I live on Laughing Coyote Way in Oro Valley, Arizona.

When I tell people this, they usually chuckle.  It occasionally happens when I’m on the phone with someone who needs to get my mailing address.  I have, by now, taken to warning them that they will at least smile, if not suppress a giggle or two.

I am uncertain the origin of the name, but there is little doubt there are nights when coyotes begin singing in the desert/golf course area behind our home. 

When they sing, it is a sort of discordant harmony sounding a bit like a chorale of sopranos warbling a Gregorian chant in a minor key.  As each member runs out of air, they gasp and howl yet once again.  Occasionally one of them, apparently not attending to the conductor, ad-libs a “...yip, yip…” solo, only to be quickly overwhelmed, yet once again by the larger chorus.

My street, however, is NOT called “Howling Coyote Way” or “Singing Coyote Way,” but rather “Laughing Coyote Way.”

What is a laughing Coyote?  What makes them laugh?  Why does something catch their attention in a humorous way?  Is it for some silly physical comedy, like purposely running into a Saguaro (pronounced ‘swa-ro’) Cactus or playing dead - feet straight in the air, tongue hanging out?

When they get tickled, do the corners of their mouths gently curl as their eyes sparkle with subtle anticipation of the impending humor?

Do they tell Coyote jokes to one another?  You know,

“Did you hear the one about the jack rabbit, desert rat and wild pig that headed to the creek to get a drink of water?”

 “None of them returned…I’m NOT lion!”

Chortle…chortle…yuck…yuck…

There is little doubt there is a lot of material available here in the Sonoran Desert…snakes, big horn sheep, lizards, birds, insects…I mean the wild life is almost immeasurable.  “Wild life…” That is in itself a completely different topic.  I mean, talk about your party animals…hmm, wild animal nightlife, that would be worth exploring sometime.

But back to the laughing coyotes…

The problem is that these animals are difficult to pin down.  It seems this activity happens well after dark when most of us two-legged creatures are tucked away in our dens and temperature controlled caves.  Some of us are up at night, but our vision and hearing is so comparatively poor, we long ago decided not to compete with nocturnal creatures hunting for food, entertainment and a good joke now and then.

I suppose, like a lot of other things in my universe, I will have to depend upon someone else’s expertise, for it seems the chances of my seeing a Coyote laugh is probably not going to happen.

I have to say, however, I envy that fellow or gal who had the privilege of seeing that event and had the sense to memorialize it “…on the street where I live.” 

Maybe I could conjure the spirits of George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion) or Alan Lerner and Fredrick Lowe (musical My Fair Lady) for some catchy lyric/tune…OR simply accept that there are some things in the universe not everyone is privileged to know…

- ted

Moments of reflection...

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have.

Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”

- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

The temperature had warmed to 32 degrees (0C) on that cold winter’s day in New York City.  Below 10 degrees (-12C) the night before, we prepared to layer clothing as much as we could – we didn’t need as much as we had anticipated.

The journey began with a shuttle to Newark Airport, then the Number 62 bus to Penn Station where we picked up the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) train for our destination on Manhattan Island.  All told, the trip was nearly an hour and a half with the time passing quickly, filled by small talk to cover an undercurrent of somber anticipation.

At the end of the line, we exited the station riding a long escalator from the underground train, embracing the cold winter’s air. Out the exit and to our left, we walked around the extremely tall building coming to the place for which we had made this journey:

Ground Zero of the World Trade Center.

“Ground Zero,” a term used to describe a point on the earth’s surface closest to the detonation of an explosion.  On this day, as it turned out, it was both geographic and soulful – the physical site and our hearts…

In Memoriam…

The memorial fountains – one for each of the destroyed towers – and subterranean museum sites are framed on three sides by Vesey, Liberty and Church streets…the West Side Highway ‘closes the box’…

As we approached the first of the two deeply set fountains, an eerie feeling seeped through my skin…a feeling not so easy to describe, a ‘presence’ really…a ‘knowing’…a disconcerting sensation, communicating the inexpressible magnitude this place had played in our lives and our history.

It wasn’t the first time an awareness of ‘other presence’ had pressed on my spirit. It happened at Dealy Plaza, in the West End District of Dallas where a young American President was assassinated….Auschwitz-Birkenau where the showers of death and work camps of the ‘living dead’ still resonate in the air…

Here, once again the cloak of discomfort and overwhelming sense of loss oozed through my clothing, both fabric and living, to unbalance the chemistry in my mind. 

There is no way to equate these events; it was simply the common denominator of holy sobriety covering my soul I found so unsettling.

We gazed into the pit of the fountains around which names of those lost in the North Tower were engraved, the water at the bottom of this dark cube fell into a smaller and darker cube in its center…lives lost…slipping out of sight…into the abyss…

Hold your mind…don’t slip too far into a bottomless pit of thought. I told myself.

The Museum…

We had the time and so purchased tickets for the museum…the intimate memorial…the place in which threads of the end of the lives of real people who had breathed and loved and struggled and failed and succeeded – everyday lives – were woven into an experiential tapestry that will no doubt echo and reverberate and resound in the coming months and years until my breath, as theirs, is finished.

Photo after photo of folks with expressions of disbelief and shock lined the entryway just inside the entrance…a common expression emerging amongst the faces of every race and creed – hands over mouth or on forehead, trying to make sense of the paper and debris floating through the air and to the street below like celebratory confetti…there was no celebration here.

People had simply been going on about their days with the freedom this country provides.

The event was unthinkable!

The long escalator into the cavernous main museum lay right beside a set of stairs used by some who escaped the unfolding apocalypse…that physically “…escaped the unfolding apocalypse…” – for of little doubt they did not escape leviathan who buried his fearfully long and poisonous talons deeply into their minds that fateful day.

There were so many things in this tomb of memories…fire trucks and ambulances that had been mangled and bent…enormous girders warped and twisted like pieces of taffy…parts of cars and bicycles and shoes worn by people that day.

Along the walls of commemoration were video clips chronicling the unbelievable 

series of events…television programs and news casts interrupted,

“In New York City Today, we are getting reports that an

airplane has just crashed into one of the Twin Towers.”

“Wait just a minute General, we have actual footage of

the airplane crashing into the North Tower!” Cut to video…

“Alice, this is John,” the unknown voice said.  “An airplane

has just crashed into the other tower.  It’s…it’s…well, it’s

just horrible. We’re okay in this tower, I’ll call you later, bye.”

Of course, John was not okay and the return call to Alice never came.

On the walls were quotes from those who had lost loved ones.  The most poignant to me:

“I wished the day would never end, because that day began

with Alan alive, and I wanted to stay in the day he had life.”

So much to see…

Animated flight patterns and timelines of the hijackings appeared on walls mesmerizing those watching…histories and flight patterns of the dozen or more flights the they took as they studied the habits of flight attendants and pilots as months of practice runs were taken in preparation…all of which was chilling.

In the days following the attack and collapse of the towers, hand made pictures were posted all over the city with variances of these messages - hoping against hope:

“Has anyone seen this man (woman)?  If so, please contact___”

“William ____, my father did not come home.  If you know

anything about him, please call ______”

That day while people ran from those buildings, police and firefighters ran into them, doing everything in their power to help people escape the every increasing inferno above.  More than four hundred of them died helping others as the buildings collapsed on top of them.

What can be said, really?

This place struck reverence into my heart. It is in moments like this, that one’s vocabulary fails to provide anything meaningful to express the magnitude of sobriety and feelings.

There are so many things that are still unfolding in my mind, I am uncertain what to say.

Perhaps I can say this.

Every week, I GET to write whatever I like as I carry on my life, and put it up for public view. Whatever the reader feels about the things I say, I am secure that the ‘thought police’ will not knock on my door to take me away.  This, of course, has not historically nor culturally always been the case.

I am grateful for this, because I understand I only have this moment to think about things I would like to say… this moment to write these thoughts…this moment to appreciate that the unexpected future rushing toward me at light speed, may bring with it...

the unknown…the unthinkab…

- ted