Re-creation

I’m stumbling over starting to write again. Can’t seem to gather the whole thought, or even enough to work out the rest through writing. Oh, I’ve started several posts, but they don’t go anywhere; I can’t get a resolution to what I’m trying to say. I’m not even sure that I know what I want to say. So, to some extent, the writing must be what is important to me. It is the thing that I must do, that I keep coming back to.  (I haven’t always shared my writing. Piles of blue notebooks and loose sheets of essays and poems have crowded bottom drawers of old dressers for years. Thoughts and explorations not shared.) Like the road rather than the destination, I am more addicted to the journey than to where I wind up. When Lydia and I travel, we nearly always have problems, deviations from our plan. Together we work out a solution and continue; the problem and solution making the trip richer, the bond between us stronger.  We are always glad when we arrive home but, I think we experience a touch of anti-climax, a bit of let-down.

Our lives have been changing. To get out into the world has become difficult because of the contraptions I need to haul around. I saw a post the other day of my sister-in-law walking on the beach at Oceanside, the site of so many of our early, wedded memories, and realized that I am not able to walk the beach anymore. My walker won’t go there, and I can’t go without it. It gave me pause, as the generations before me used to say, but mentally I just added beach walking to the growing list of “can’t do’s” I keep in my head.

I started two classes this week: one is an exercise class for seniors called “bones and balance,” which is meant to keep us old folks active and prevent petrification. The other is a rehabilitation class, intended to help me regain stamina and improved breathing. I say intended because all I have had to do so far is use a reclining step machine until the resulting pain in my knees produces mild hallucinations. I have a theory about this process which I call re-creation and rehabilitation. I think that we are constantly re-created after our initial creation. Life and biology change us. We grow taller, our voices change, we need glasses, we develop arthritis, etc.  In response to this we either re-create ourselves into a newer functional being, or barring that, we rehabilitate ourselves to cope with the change as best we can.

Our personal re-creation is a self-determined decision to change, to improve.  In the early 1960’s, America was convinced that its children were lagging behind the rest of the world physically. Our parents were convinced that we were soft. Television was to blame. The answer was physical fitness tests: sit ups, push-ups, pull ups, sprints and a mile run became the twice-yearly measure. Like most tests, the measurement was unfair and did not account for the wide differences in physical maturity levels of kids between the ages of 8 and 15. I was the shortest kid in my grade, barely over 5 feet tall, and perhaps 80 pounds after a full meal. I could do a few sit ups, one or two pushups, and could finish the mile without throwing up, beating only a friend who was a shade taller, but weighed twice as much. My biggest humiliation was chin ups. It was the one time that everyone stood around watching. I could not do one chin up. I could, however, manage to turn extremely purple while trying!

I rarely shared feelings with my father. He was a stoic policeman. We did not share hugs or emotional sentiments. I was convinced that I was a huge disappointment to him. Not only was I not any sort of an athlete, but I wrote poetry! On this occasion however, I shared my humiliation with him. I explained that I needed a ride downtown to Sears, in whose basement I had recently seen, near the gym shorts, school t-shirts and jock straps (Sears carried logoed gym clothes, which we were required to wear at school) a chin up bar. It was ingenious. It hung in a door frame by the pressure of unscrewing it to make it longer. (You knew it was tightly seated when the doorframe began to make cracking noises and spaces appeared around the finishing nails).

I don’t remember the conversation; I just know that he drove me downtown because I soon had a chin up bar across my bedroom door. I promised myself that I would do a chin up, or at least try, every time I passed through my door. I kept the promise to myself, though I only did the chin ups when no one was around to observe me. I don’t remember the daily effort. What I do remember is the end of year fitness tests. As always, I was next to the last in the mile, but did not throw up. I didn’t care. I was waiting for the chin ups. Alphabetically, I was one of the first called. I jumped up to the bar and pumped out 10 chin ups like they were the easiest thing in the world while the coach counted. I dropped to the floor and smiled at the coach. He nodded and jotted in the grade book. It was the first and only time I ever received an A in PE.

Rehabilitation is a response to negative change. It is a self-determined attempt to regain lost ground. I’ve been through rehabilitation several times. Both of my knees were operated on before the less invasive arthroscopy came into vogue. Post both surgeries I was subjected to rehabilitation therapy from therapists certified in the Gestapo school of physical improvement. A process of bending the knee until the pain was unbearable was employed, at which point more pressure was applied. I regretted having the surgery in the first place for years. I still perspire when I remember it all.

Most recently, I have been going through pulmonary rehabilitation, a process in which my lung function is improved through leg torture. Imagine if you will (thank you Rod Serling) a 71 year old man with 40% lung function and an 81 year old body, strapped into a recumbent bike, who is forced to pedal uphill for half an hour while being forced to watch close-captioned home improvement shows. (The TV is close captioned so that the person on the next bike can be heard explaining his phlegm color to you.) The confluence of these events creates a quantum physics anomaly in which time stops and one becomes an example of Schrodinger’s cat, both in and out of hell at the same time.

The benefits escape me. After the session getting up from a chair requires 3 or 4 practice lunges and having once become vertical, being subject to a period of disequilibrium in which I, as my grandfather would say, stand and “look dumb as a post”.

There are no instructions in life. I do the best I can. I’ve re-created and rehabilitated myself countless times in both big ways and little. For the most part I try to stick to the important things and fluff off some of the lesser items (do I really need to play the harmonica or speak Gaelic after all?).

I have class again tomorrow.

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