From Strength Training to Childhood Memories

It’s been a long haul, my commitment at the YMCA. Five months is the longest I’ve ever stuck to an exercise program. The difference being I was working with a personal trainer this time who kept changing up the workouts and I felt like I had something to prove after getting rejected from taking her "Move it To Lose it" class for not being strong enough. I freely admit my heart wasn’t into the workouts this past month and I wanted badly to be off her strength building train. Exercise is time consuming! Sure, I could have dropped out, not scheduled anymore appointments with Julie but keeping a blog helped drive me to see it through to the end of my paid-up sessions so I could write about her final evaluation on what I’ve accomplished. If I wasn’t a blogger, I’d have gone back to being like a toad burrowing under a log by day and coming out for dinner in the cool of night.

Practical differences strength training made in my life: I’m able to walk up and down stairs one foot after another instead of always leading with my right. I no longer have to seek out the handicapped bathroom stalls. Much improved posture. Improved balance. I can pick up the dog, all 29 pounds of him and easily stoop to do things close to the floor. I’m able to do my own pedicures again. I'm less fearful of falling. But the biggest change of all is I no longer feel physically fragile. 

From my trainer’s evaluation: I only lost 10.75 pounds which sucks but Julie says that I’ve actually lost 13.75 pounds of actual fat because I gained 3 pounds of muscle mass---they have a fancy scales that can tell the difference between lean mass, water mass and fat mass. I also gained two pounds of water mass, probably water retention from the heat, so using ‘gym math’ you could say I lost 15.75 pounds. You could say it but I won’t. I also lost a total of 20.75 inches added together from the nine places that were measured, my waist being the biggest loser with 4.5 inches. She was thrilled that "all my hard work paid off." I was surprised. She says I need to---get this---eat 300 more calories a day to lose weight faster. (I track my calories in and calories burned on my Fitbit.) On the test for upper body strength I can now officially pull 100 pounds fourteen times in one minute and for lower body strength I can do thirty-one wall squats in a minute. And those two achievements might come in handy if I want to get a job baling hay back in the 1950s when they actually used manual labor to stack those bales on wagons.

This week is the beginning of my unscheduled---or I should say my lightly scheduled summer. There was just one other thing on my day planner this week besides the above mentioned ‘date’ with Julie and I’ll write about my appointment with my bone doctor next time. I’m thinking about signing up for a cardio drumming class at a nutrition store now that I’ll have more time. I’ve been wanting to try it and few people know (or care) that I spent time in my youth taking drum lessons only I didn’t have a drum at home so I practiced by sitting on the floor and banging on the hardwood floor. My mother was a saint. Or maybe she had a good set of ear plugs, I don't know which. I also took saxophone lessons and lessons on the Hawaiian guitar, the latter of which I stuck with the longest. My brother took lessons on the accordion for quite a few years while I was jumping around from instrument to instrument. He got pretty good at it and we both played on a “stage” a couple of times. It wasn’t a big deal in hindsight. It was at a yearly Christmas party at my dad’s CIO union hall and other kids of its members took part in the talent show as well. I loved that union hall. I did my first political volunteering there working a phone bank on Election Day to help get out the vote.

What I remember most about being on that stage in front of 200+ people is the plush, forest green velvet dress I wore two years in a row. To this day, my younger cousin reminds me often about how much she loved getting my hand-me-down clothing. We were both sad when we out grew that velvet dress. It wasn’t that I had a great wardrobe back in those days---what my mom didn’t make came from Sears & Roebuck’s. It was the fact that my cousin’s dad drank up so much of his paychecks that they didn't have a lot. My mom frequently slipped her sister cash from her own grocery allowance so my cousins could eat. He was a mean, abusive drunk but despite it all (or maybe because of it) his only daughter grew into a wonderful, caring human being. She is truly a woman with a pure heart who works hard for her church, who would help anyone in need. My cousin’s formative years were obviously harder than mine but she married one of the sweetest, most supportive guys on earth. And they have so many loving grandchildren that she’ll never have to worry about dying alone and lonely. Sometimes the yin and yang of the universe can only be seen with a mind's eye overview that comes from our own longevity but one thing is for sure: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was right when he coined the phrase, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” ©

Photo at the top: That’s me playing my Hawaiian guitar at the Christmas party and I’m wearing the velvet dress.

Birthday Parties and Online Auctions

The woman in the photo above was married to my cousin. What does that make her, an in-law cousin? The twins were her babies and that’s me holding one of them. My parents were surrogate grandparents to this set of twins and another set that came into their family a few years later. Growing up, the two sets of twins spent a lot of time at our house and I did a lot of babysitting at their house. I should probably blame them and a family of nine kids I also babysat during my high school years for a phrase I’ve used tongue-in-cheek through-out my entire adult life: “I don’t babysit anyone who can’t say, ‘My stomach hurts. I need to go to the hospital.’” Not that anything bad ever happened while baby-sitting but babies are such a scary responsibility and by the time I was thirty the gods of infertility whispered in my ear, “Go forth and raise poodles, they’re easier” and I obeyed. I must have been a good baby-sitter, though, because the twins in this photo claim I was their role model and was responsible for them setting their sights on going to college. If that’s true, I’m flattered because they grew up to be wonderful women.

On Saturday the two sets of twins threw a party for their mom's 85th birthday and I was excited to see this branch of the family again. Life and distance got in the way of staying close in recent decades except for weddings and funerals. But family is still family and when you have so many shared memories it’s easy to fill an afternoon with laughter. We were all asked to bring a photo and the one above it the only one I had. Next winter I really need to do something about transferring all my slides to a computer file. I have a huge box of slides in the basement, twenty-twenty years of my life documented in a format I can’t access. The librarian who taught a genealogy class I took last fall said there is a raging debate in library circles involving transferring microfiche files to computers. One side says in a 100 years people may not be able to access computer files in the formats we use now and they shouldn’t destroy the microfiche as their documents are put online. Apparently, the microfiche reader machines are simple to maintain and repair. Others say it’s nonsense to let them continue to take up space. I get that debate, says the women with a box of floppy disks I don’t know what to do with. They’re sitting next to my slides.

Friday I met the son-I-with-I-had at a humongous auction house in a small town near-by. All their auctions are online and my friend swears by this method of getting rid of stuff so I thought I’d give it a try. When I pulled up to the loading dock there were 10-15 others doing the same thing and after getting a tour inside I told my friend, “I think I’ve just found my new best friend.” He laughed and replied, “I said exactly the same thing the first time I came here.” While I was waiting to sign in I talked to several others doing the same. They told me they are very happy with the ease and results of selling there compared to listing on e-Bay. This place take the photos, creates the listings and does the shipping all for a lower percentage than e-Bay takes and e-Bay doesn’t do anything but host your listings and process your money for an added fee. I took nine antiques Friday including three that would difficult to pack. Only one thing had a good memory attached, 42” oak and iron wagon neck yoke in case you have few a horses to hook up. 

What was the memory attached to the antique neck yoke? One time the neighborhood was having its annual garage sale weekend and my wheelchair bound husband came home---down the middle of the street---with a car following him at two miles an hour. It seems he tried to straddle the wagon yoke across his electric wheelchair but didn’t get very far before it fell off, so someone took pity on him and carted it home for him. I hated that yoke on sight, but he was being his pre-stroke self so it made me happy to see him happy with his “prize.”

I’ve sold most of Don’s big “prizes” and “guy stuff” off since he passed but I still have more purging to go. If I can get into a rhythm of taking a load out to the auction house every week until the snow flies again I’d be in great shape to move next spring. That IF is a big word, though, because in my world I’m easily distracted by a widow’s bittersweet memories. I do have a Plan B; don't I always? If I lose my common-sense and buy a condo on impulse---like I did my car---before I’ve finished purging my new "best friend" has my back. They'll come to the house and buy whatever I don't move out when I left. How easy is that?  ©

The Widow's Nightgown

It occurred to me this week that every other night I’m wearing my nightgown inside out. I take it off in a manner my mom used to call “skinning the kitty” but somewhere along the line I quit turning the nightgown right side out before hanging it on its hook. Then at night I’ll grab the wrong side out garment, put it on and when it comes off in the morning, skin-the-kitty style again, it turns right side out. This is another old people thing or I’m I just getting lazy or are they one in the same? My nightgown is actually an old, v-neck t-shirt of my husband’s. It’s extra-long and reaches my knees and it’s getting so worn and holey I really should throw it out. Boohoo, I don’t want to do that except I feel the breath of an anonymous social worker on the back of my neck, making judgments and deeming me ready for a nursing home. Someone has to save old people from the dangers of appearing sloppy and as poor as a church mouse, she'd be thinking. Note to self: Don’t start getting the mail in your nightgown because one of the neighbors could have social services on their speed dial.

My husband wasn’t much taller than me but because he was in a wheelchair and in charge of dressing himself he could never get his pants pulled up high enough on one side thus the extra-long t-shirts did a good job of hiding his fanny. This is a common problem with people in wheelchairs and it’s always bugged me that others don’t understand they can’t help it. It’s just the way it is. Disabled people usually do the best they can to dress themselves and the rest of us need to do our best to ignore an exposed fanny from time to time. That’s hard for one particular acquaintance of mine to do. She’s so judgmental on this topic that it makes me crazy, but that’s a rant I should probably turn off and go on to other things. Sometimes I forget I’m no longer an advocate for stroke survivors. I have widow and old people issues to fry now that my husband is gone.

A few days ago I took an older cousin-in-law on a little road trip to have lunch with another cousin of ours. The cousin I picked up has gotten so frail since I saw her last at my husband’s funeral but she's still as sharp and as much fun to be around as she's always been. I hope people can say the same about me when I'm her age. Back when the three of us were young I spent a fair amount of time with each of them and at lunch we had a good time talking about our families past and present. It’s a shame we lost that closeness over the years. But the miles separate us physically and our lives all went in different directions separating us in other ways. It’s the way of the world when kids grow up and leave their core families behind.

Have you ever played the what-if game where you daydream about how you would have been different if so-and-so had remained in your life? Usually we do it regarding someone negative---an x-spouse, a nasty parent or even someone we loved who didn’t love us back. Rarely do we wonder what influences a do-gooder type would have had on our life trajectory, but I did just that after our cousin’s lunch. I suspect I would have turned out to be a better person if the influence of my younger cousin had reminded in my life all these years. Let’s just say she got all the Mother Theresa genes in the family. She’s probably the most charitable, do-good person I know---genuinely sweet and giving where I’m pickier about my do-good causes and more protective of my free time. She’s touched so many lives that when she dies they'll have to hold the service in the local high school auditorium. When I die my service could take place inside a Volkswagen. In other words, she threw rocks in the pool of life, I threw tiny pebbles.

One of the most interesting things about growing older is we get to see how the choices we made early on in life panned out over the years, we get to see how the people who came in and out of our lives have enriched us or torn us down, and we get decide if we’d take a do-over if do-overs were humanly possible. I’m putting on some rose colored glasses here but I like to think that most of us by the time we enter our “Golden Years” are happy with the way we turned out---or at least we’ve made peace with our personal histories---and we wouldn’t change much in our pasts. Our collective good, bad and the ugly experiences all had a hand in building the kind of people we’ve become. Take something ugly out of the mix and more than likely we wouldn’t have the same level of appreciation for the good stuff that came along later. Bottom line: I like myself and how I turned out but I sure admire my younger cousin. She’s so much like my dad in character and personality you’d think we were switched at birth if not for the two years that separate us. Get out the fiddles, there might be a country western song in there somewhere.

My house cleaning service comes in a few days and the girl assigned to my house is in college part-time, working towards a degree in social services. She’s a sweet, compassionate young woman but I’m starting to think I should buy myself a new nightgown so I don’t end up as Exhibit B in a term paper she has to write. When to Get Involved: Signs to Look For In Our Aging Population. One of these days she’s going to hit the chapter on protecting senior citizens from themselves and she’s going to start pushing numbers on her cell phone if I don’t shape up and get rid of my shabby, widow’s nightgown beforehand. ©

P.S. This is the 200th blog I've written since my husband passed away. I don't know what that means but I thought I'd mention it.