Buddha Offerings and Circus Tricks

Dog grooming day was Monday. Drop off time was scheduled for noon with a pick up estimated at 4:00 and in between I ran errands and had lunch at a curious little hole-in-wall Chinese restaurant that had a countertop filled with coins crowded around a tall, jade Buddha. The pile was at least five inches deep and four feet long and I’m guessing it was offerings to the Triple Gem: The Buddha, Dharma and Sangha although there was no neatly printed place card denoting the meaning of all that money sitting there waiting for a snatch-and-run robbery, assuming the would-be criminal came in with a large bucket. If I’d been in a Buddhist monastery with steel bowls lined up for visitors to drop coins in I’d know they were for the monks and maintenance on the building but coins on a countertop in a restaurant? When it came time to pay my for my lunch special of $6.62 I handed the cashier the exact amount and to my surprise, the coins went on the Buddha’s pile and the bills in her cash drawer. I wondered briefly if customers are promised good fortune if we add our extra change to the pile. The cynical side of me thought it could be a clever way to make more money---like coins tossed in a tourist trap wishing well---but the idealistic side of me thought something inspirational was going on that I didn’t understand. I may have to go back again and ask some questions.

The dog grooming salon is close enough that I could go home to wait for Levi but I don’t like being home without him. It’s too quiet and I can’t hear the doorbell anymore without the dog jumping up to see who is standing on the other side of the glass, an action that lets me know how much I depend on him to be my ears when my hearing aids are sitting in their box. I should do something about that---wear those Resounds full time or buy a louder, old person’s doorbell---but I can’t bring myself to do either one. When my husband lived alone he was a heavy sleeper and he wired up a factory break bell to a timer that he used for an alarm clock, mounted it on the wall above his bed. He could sleep through it but the neighbors from across the street couldn’t and after listening to it for 10 or 15 minutes they’d come across the street and bang on his bedroom window while having their daughter dial his phone. The combination of the alarm, the phone and the banging would finally wake him up. Except for the time when it didn’t and they called me, knowing I had a key. After a half hour of bells and banging he still hadn’t woke up and they were afraid he was dead. Fast forward many years later when Don went in for a sleep study and he came out with a biPAP machine and that ended the era of nagging him awake with bells, whistles, water and letting the dog get involved in the action. Just the idea of getting a louder doorbell gives me flashbacks. Do I really want my neighbors to know every time someone comes to my front door?

I ate too much on grooming day. A protein shake for breakfast, Mongolian beef for lunch and a hot dog bun filled with chicken and cheese for dinner plus two---count them---one, two bowls of ice cream with peanuts and chocolate sauce. Why do I do that to myself? When I cut my personal trainer loose at the YMCA I cut myself loose, too. The half-gallon of ice cream in the freezer is the first I’ve brought home in months and I can’t leave it alone. I have no self-control when it’s around. I’m cheating myself in other ways, too, like recently I figured out if I go to the gym on Sundays, I can count that as both the third workout in the previous week and the first workout of the coming week. I do like summer Sundays at the gym, though. It’s relatively quiet except for this past Sunday when a weird woman dragged a cycling bike out of the cycling studio and into the hallway where everyone passes by and she was singing every third or fourth sentence coming through her ear bugs. “Get it on!” “Yeah, one more time!” "I like it like that." I would have told her to get a room but she had one and gave it up in favor of being an exhibitionist. 

Most people don’t talk or use cell phones at the gym. Most people respect each other’s concentration on their workout programs. I broke that rule this week with Circus Guy. I call him that for two reasons: 1) He has red and green tattoos covering every inch of skin what shows except his face and, 2) he does this thing where he stands one-footed on a soccer ball while holding a twenty pound weight plate in each hand. And he does this for several minutes on each leg, then he repeats that set two more times! When I walked past him on Sunday, I pointed to the ball he was balancing on and I said, “Now, that’s impressive!” He laughed and replied, “Comes from spending my childhood on hockey skates.” That was the longest conversation I’d had in days. Woo is me.  ©

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.

Jump Ropes, Book Club and Flowers

Next week is my bi-annual appointment with my internist and it’s been the driving force in making me go to the YMCA to help me lose the weight I gained recently. When I saw him last fall I was up five pounds since spring, then I added another four over the holidays and I knew he wouldn’t ignore that kind of weight gain two appointments in a row. Well, guess what! He’ll never know. I’m back to the same weight I was a year ago. He might even praise me for the five (really nine) pound loss and I will light up like a jar of lightning bugs on a warm summer night. It’s not that he’s a tyrant of a doctor, quite the opposite. He’s so nice that I hated the idea of disappointing him with a broken promise. I have a ton more to lose so I’ll try to ride the Diet & Exercise train for as long as I can. Picture me with “Iowa Blackie,” the wandering hobo poet---him with his paper and pens and me with a set of dumbbells.

Going to the gym is fertile ground for people watching and maybe that will keep me going, like Blackie writing about the people he met as he rode the rails across the country. For example, I haven’t seen people jumping ropes since grade school but they're a common sight at the Y. The ropes they use aren’t like the clothes lines we used back in the good old days. They come in different materials: plastic beaded, "licorice" whips, clothe, vinyl cords, cables, leather and with lights embedded---$5.00 to $80.00. You pick a rope by the surface where you’re going to jump and the speed you want to do it at. Lighted ropes are for night but they would be good in public places. Those wire-thin cable jump ropes are so hard to see when in action that I didn’t even realize that’s what people were doing the first few times I saw them used at the gym. I thought they were just jumping up and down. Online there are plenty of directions for how to jump rope and for picking the right length rope. (With one foot standing on it, you lift the handles and they shouldn’t go past your armpits.) How did we ever manage to learn how to jump rope before the internet? 

A good jump rope workout, according to what I’ve read, is ten minutes which burns 135 calories. How depressing is that? A scoop of vanilla ice cream is 137 calories. You’d have to jump two hours for a banana split. Still, I wanted to try. How hard can it be? I thought, remembering my days on the playground where we 'Double Dutch' jumped. (Two girls twirled two ropes while two other girls jumped in unison.) Fast forward sixty-five years to this week when I tried jumping rope again and I couldn’t propel myself up in the air more than a half inch off the floor! I was glad no one was around to see my feeble attempts. And I felt ashamed of myself for laughing in my head at Boxer Boy, a kid in his early twenties at the gym who wears a baggy hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head and so close around his face that no one could ever pick him out in a lineup. He couldn’t keep the rope going more than six-seven times before missing the rhythm. He’d alternate his jumping attempts with shadow boxing using five pound dumbbells and he must have been boxing with a pretend comic book character because his verbal sound effects echoed around the strength training room, “Wham!” “Bam!” “Pow!” 

This week my book club met and we discussed Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. With 531 pages, at first I dreaded reading it but it was easily polished off in a week because it was so good I couldn’t put it down. It was set during WWII when the Nazis occupy France. The two main characters were: 1) A blind French girl whose family took part in the Resistance by broadcasting coded messages to the Allies, and 2) a German boy who had a talent for working with the new-back-then radio technology and he was assigned to a unit that tracked down where the radio transmissions were coming from so they could be destroyed. Half the group didn’t finish the book but we still had an interesting discussion void any of the disagreements we’ve had with a few other books. And for the bonus round, I got a chocolate rabbit from the facilitator of the book club for having an April birthday. Even when I try to avoid them, temptations keep finding me!

I came home from book club to find a bouquet of flowers on my porch from my oldest niece. She is so thoughtful and loving, not just to me but to everyone. The arrangement has miniature pussy willows in it and I’m hoping I can root them to plant outside. We had them in our yard and at our cottage when I was growing up and if there is such a thing as comfort flowers (like comfort foods) pussy willows, lily of the valley and lilacs would be mine. All and all, the week ended so much better than it started and it’s not over yet. Friday I’m having lunch with friends I’ve known for nearly fifty years. They’re in town from out of state and I always feel honored when I’m included on their list of people to see while they’re here. ©

 

World Champions with Jump Ropes