P.E.

I told my trainer* this evening that I would say I feel like an old man, except I’m quite sure that as a kid, I would have felt just as winded if not worse. Teenager me had nothing but disdain for physical fitness; I saw no percentage in it, since I couldn’t use my body to earn a living (hey, no wisecracks!) I was a creature of mind. If anything, I resented the time it took away from my studies.

Team sports were particularly humiliating, so from the moment I first had the option (10th grade), I took the weight training classes. I’d do a circuit or two around the machines, but mostly I’d hang with my tribe, the Hispanic gangsters who liked me because they liked my sis, who taught English at the same school. And we all avoided the SJs, the Asian toughs who really did know how to use the machines and could have kicked all our asses in a heartbeat if we weren’t so far beneath their contempt.

I was never as bad as the guy on the left, nor as buff as the guy on the right. I believe in the Golden Mean.

I don’t recall building up much muscle back then. Is it possible for a body to change so fundamentally? Or was my problem a lack of weight? Nowadays, I see myself as a rather hairy philosopher’s stone, readily turning fat into muscle provided I give it the necessary investment of pain and sweat. Sadly, this body is a catalytic converter that can run the reaction in both directions, quite capable of converting gold into base metal, better known as pudge. So perhaps in high school I couldn’t put on the muscle because I didn’t possess the necessary lard. I weighed 135-140 pounds back then, which is damn near impossible for me to believe. But yeah, I did. There’s a photo of me and the old gf at the beach, and I’m wearing nothing but a pair of cutoff jeans. Not exactly washboard abs, but nothing flopping over my waist band, either.

It took lower back pain to get me to exercise. That, and an abiding disgust for my pudge-ridden body. I’m happy to say that even after 6 months of no exercise at all (thanks to that horrid commute), my old fat pants would fall off me — so I didn’t back-slide that much. On the other hand, I’ve been working out for nearly six weeks, and I suspect I still can’t fit into my super skinny pants.

We had to run laps for our high school weight training class. Was it a mile a day, or a mile once a week? Maybe a mile a day. You’d think that would have given me the habit of running, if not an actual love for it, and in fact I did run on occasion while at Berkeley. But running is boring (and ultimately destructive, I suspect). I’d much rather hop on the elliptical and read a book or watch TV while I’m shvitzing away.

And now, 31 years later, it’s weights I keep coming back to. Except, now my trainer tells me I have to build up my core strength and my flexibility before I can use the machines. She’s put me on a strict diet: no more than two machines per workout. You know what? I can handle an hour or more on the elliptical at high resistance and I’m okay with that. I can even do an hour of weights, and I’m okay with that too.

But this core stuff? Oh. My. God. Ten minutes, and I’m about ready to die. And yet I keep coming back for more. She says I’m one of her two favorite clients*****, I think because of the amount of punishment I’m willing to suck up.

Sometimes, masochism pays.

D.

*Yes, I’ve become one of those rich yuppie** bastards who has a personal trainer: two sessions a week for four weeks, after which I should be able to figure out for myself how best to keep in shape. Any guilt I might have over this, any self-accusations of egocentrism, any worries that I have become a stereotype, tend to evaporate ten minutes into the session, when the sweat’s pouring off me in rivers. She works me far harder than I can ever manage to work myself.

**Hmm. The Y in yuppie no longer applies, does it? So what am I, a muppie***?

***M for middle-aged****.

****Which is such a delightfully optimistic term, don’t you think? Because by calling one’s 40s and 50s “middle-aged,” it assumes a life span of 80 to 100 years. Which wouldn’t be a bad deal, assuming I can keep busting my ass at the gym like this. Hey, stranger things have happened. Look at Jack LaLanne, still going strong at 94.

*****The other is a woman with one leg.

Land

In some of my job search locations, a guy can buy a house with acres of land. This would make some sense if we kept horses or sheep or whatever, but in my middle age I’ve realized I don’t need land. And yet, I cannot deny the appeal.

Karen and I both grew up in homes with relatively small back yards. My first house had a back yard and a “back back yard,” an area beyond a fence which was undeveloped and which was, beyond question, more fun that our St. Augustine-green back yard. There were horned lizards in the back back yard, and wild native plants, and a broken down area of fence where I could cut across to our neighbor Sadie’s back yard, and that was a jungle. Sadie’s idea of yard maintenance was to let the place achieve its own equilibrium. You could easily imagine man-eating vines and quicksand and all manner of other threats.

When we moved to Texas, we rented at first, but eventually we bought a house in the hills northwest of San Antonio. We had an acre of land and it was largely unusable thanks to chiggers and nasty burrs and, most of all, fire ants.

Land ownership meant walking my property no less than every two weeks with a big jug of Sevin (a neurotoxic bug poison), sprinkling mound after mound with the nasty white powder. It was a hopeless battle. My only solace was the fact that the little bastards never once invaded our home (but the scorpions did). What did they find to eat out there? Chiggers, no doubt. The land was barren scrub, save for a few oak trees close to our house; the soil was yellow calichi, also known as “hard pan,” which is a far more descriptive and accurate term.

So we couldn’t garden in the stuff, not without putting down a ton of real topsoil, and thanks to the burrs and fire ants we couldn’t let Jake play outside. We had a tortoise, Sydney, who liked to roam the perimeter and dig his way underneath the fence. He was looking for tortoise babes. Twice, he made it to our neighbor’s yard, and she kindly returned him. On the third escape, he made it into the wastes which lay beyond our property’s western edge. I hope he found someone.

Since then, we haven’t had much land. Oh, on paper the lot in Oregon was 3/4 acre, but much of it was unusable due to those nasty salmonberry vines. (Really, if we had to have berries, why couldn’t we have had blackberries?) I had some land for a garden and managed to keep a few flowers alive, as well as a humongous rosemary bush. You have to really work to kill rosemary.

I wish I had more time to garden. Like my grandfather, who took a distinctly masculine pride in growing squash four times as large as was sold in the market, I like dirt, I like to grow things. But I like so many other things so much better. Gardening tends to take a back seat.

I’m getting old: all I want is enough land for a hot tub.

D.

Mothballs

Weird how smells can take you back.

No one uses moth balls anymore — at least, not anyone I know. I don’t think we used them in our household when we were growing up . . . but my grandparents did. I never knew that until now.

On the way back from the grocery store, I stopped off at a local Thai market. I had been meaning to check out this store for the last few months, but hadn’t gotten around to it. But, hey, I want to get back into cooking Thai food, so no time like the present.

I bought three different kinds of rice noodles: the circular wrappers for making cuon, the thin vermicelli used to stuff the cuon, and the wider noodles for making pad thai. I bought red, green, and masamun curry paste, some coconut milk, two different kinds of squid snacks, a mix for making satay chicken (because I’m lazy), and pre-made sauce for pad thai (see last parenthetical). I went up and down the aisles twice so that I wouldn’t miss anything important, and it was the back of the store that brought me to a halt.

Actually, it was the huge crystals of alum that caught my attention. I wonder what it’s used for? But when I got closer to examine that bag, I found another bag labeled “naphthalene balls.” You can smell them right through the plastic. I stood there for a few minutes, smelling the bag, and even after I moved on, I kept smelling my fingers. I was back in the house on Atlantic, and it seemed a small matter to close my eyes, step forward, and enter that forever-dark living room with its shmatte-covered sofa, the chair wrapped in plastic that No One Must Ever Sit In, the TV no one ever turned on, the cabinets of tchotchkes. I can see my grandfather sitting in his recliner, I can hear my grandmother yelling from the kitchen. (The GM: Off your ass, useless! The GF: Shut up, you toothless witch! Half in English, half in Yiddish.) A few steps further and I’m sitting on the wooden bench of the kitchen’s dinette. My grandmother gives me a slice of my grandfather’s bakery’s rye bread mit shmear (margarine, never butter) and her signature beverage, watered down RC Cola, or something very much like it.

Something tells me that smell was everywhere. Something tells me you only need to bring a bag of naphthalene balls into your house and leave it there one night, and your house will forever have that smell.

The package said: Covers odor of mildew and decay with sweet smell.

I wonder what my grandparents were trying to hide? Maybe the odor of that monkey my grandfather kept hidden in the attic, the one he would never show me.

D.