Some days you just feel older. And, some days that’s not entirely a bad thing.
Today, I tried the Monday gym class at work. Monday is different from Thursday and Friday. It begins with an M for one thing. The gym class is also taught by a boy. A boy helping a room full of the women do cardio and calisthenics and stretches and other circuit training things. I’ll judge the workout by the level of pain I feel tomorrow.
The class today really pulled me back into the hellish vortex that was real, state-mandated, public-school, excessive cruelty for the non-athletic gym class of yore. Imagine, if you will, a modern gymnasium with weights and Nautilus-type equipments and mirrors and mats and heart-racing cardio tools. In it, were nine women, ranging from about 20 something to a definite top of 44 years young, and one cocky young man clearly digging his role as leader, trainer and head jock.
Already, as the dude quasi-flirted with the more vocal, more gym-enjoying chicks, I was a bit transported to, I don’t know, the 70s, when I never ever ever got into the athletic groove, even though I occasionally tried and sporadically didn’t fail. I wasn’t then and ain’t now someone who rolls with the thrill of athletic competition. (Putting aside the fun tossing, catching, batting practice M. and I put in yesterday afternoon at the field down the street in prep for the company softballing.)
The teenage mortification was revisited when, whilst jogging in place, I trotted on top of an errant dumbbell. Immediately, I twisted my ankle, over-flexed my toes trying to get off the ankle and dropped my ass to the mat. Ahhhhhh, grace.
I regained composure, more or less, from down on the floor. Macho as I can be in such a little moment of minor humiliation, I jumped back up to shake it off and rejoin the next exercise. I am indisputably a clod.
The beauty of this stupid moment is the difference between four decades of living versus a scant one or so decades. I don’t fucking care. Sure, I would have preferred not to fall down, and I could do without the ankle-twisting, but it really doesn’t fucking matter. And, even if the three chicks in the class who I think might be capable of a whisper and laugh at such unremitting awkwardness did, in fact, laugh, I wouldn’t fucking care. After all, unlike at 14 I can outline why my life will go on unscathed and probably measures up OK.
Now, you contrast that with the hell in about seventh grade, when I guess I would have been about 12. At 12, I had breastages, hips and the kind of uterus that was telling me every month that it was all ready with the egg-dropping action by sloughing off the neglected buggers, even though sex thoughts would be running behind a few years much later. I was already standing at about the height, 5’3″ or so, with which I seem to be sticking at this point. I outweighed almost everyone in my class, boy, girl and teacher.
Gymnastics was the unit in class way back when. Older girls, maybe from eighth grade, were the gym teacher’s assistants to help teach the moves and spot our class on the moves that needed spotting. We stood in a couple of lines with the accomplished older girls holding us up through the handstand lesson, one by one.
Think about an averaged-sized 13 year old. Think about an above-average grown-woman-sized 12 year old. Picture the momentum required to heft your ass over teakettle thrust your hips into the air and lithely balance your legs in inversion from where they usually stand. The older girl’s task was to grab my legs as a flew my feet up into the air and help me gain my balance.
Remember that momentum, I mentioned? I flipped myself onto my hands and that rascal momentum rocked me straight through the older girl’s grip flat onto my back. And with the thrust and hitting the planks, I knocked the wind completely out of my lungs, and in dignity terms, the wind right out of my sails. I lay on the hardwood floor making an eerie squeaking noise panic rising as I tried desperately to breathe. Gradually, air returned to me and I drew breath.
About the same time I regained my ability to breathe freely, the gym teacher had cleared the whole classroom, adjourning class early. She also sent an envoy next door to the boys’ gym to help us out. I narrowly avoided the indignity of getting lifted and carried out by two relatively burly boys brought in for the heavy lifting. I insisted on leaving the gym under my own motor.
My face still feels scarlet when I think of the emptying gym and my squeaking, panicked keen.
If only one had the 40+ years of not giving a shit perspective, it would have been a better day in seventh grade.
Of course, the flipside of gym class when you’re an old crone, is also that which makes you sound like a cranky old lady inside of your head. The other horror of taking the class is hitting the showers with the other women afterward.
Apparently, one of the crew had perspired enough to render her bra unwearable. (Side note, thank the powers that be for my genes. Even on a 90 degree day in August in the throes of passion, I glisten, I dew, but I do not drip rivulets of sweat, and I don’t stank.)
The locker room convo dealt with the dilemma and the overwrought worry and discussion of braless-ness. Behind the shower curtain, the cranky, old bag in me thought, “Jesus Christ, put your shirt on and relax. It ain’t like anyone’s going to ask you to do jumping jacks at your desk job, and they’re only tits.” Then again, I’m stupid enough to have stood on stage with nothing but a microphone and my mammaries flapping in the breeze.
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