If you don’t know; I don’t like going to the gym. I think I am on year four of trying to establish a regular habit of going to the gym. Past behavior predicts that I will stick to it for three months and then fall off the wagon.
But I have noticed something different of late…
No one is at the gym when I go. Not sure if this is due to me showing up way earlier than I normally would, or maybe the gym is about to go out of business. As of this moment, I can’t tell.
What I do know is that there is no one around, and the gym is quiet, except for the music they pump in, but at that hour it’s rather low. There’s no one in the locker room, no one hanging around the water fountain, no one hanging around the front desk, and no one standing outside talking on their phone. What there is happens to be a handful of, dare I say it, normal looking people.
So, the atmosphere has changed, but not so much my attitude. I still don’t want to be there. I would like to be healthier, and I would like to lose ten pounds, but, ahhh, still don’t want to be there.
I am trying to find a way to enjoy being at the gym. I don’t think I will ever get that workout “high” where you feel better about yourself. What I am looking for is a good use of my time. I run for thirty minutes, at least to get in two miles, and sometimes my mind does wander. Today, I was thinking about some of the awful office jobs I have had. (That didn’t make me feel better.) I would try to read, but I’m running, so that doesn’t work. Truth of the matter, for me anyway, I can’t multitask when I’m running. I would like to be more efficient, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Anyway, I think going to the gym early in the morning is going to work for me. Not that in want it to, but glad that it is.
(This has nothing to do with Doomsday, or Doomsday Preppers… I just like the way the title sounded.)
Not that anyone is keeping score, but I am a stay at home parent, and, by the way, I really do enjoy it. But that’s not what this is about.
As the primary care giver to my daughter, that means I am the go-to guy when it comes to getting her to soccer practice after school three days a week. It’s not a huge burden, and though it can be dicey getting to practice on time, it’s a good way to spend some time with the kid. But as the primary care giver, that means when we get home, I also have to get dinner going.
Which brings me to prepping diner for my family. I’m not talking about anything complicated here, just getting all the ingredients ready ahead of time, sometimes in small efficient containers, so when we walk in the door, I can start making it.
I have been doing this for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say that I get such a feeling of satisfaction of sweeping into the apartment, seamlessly moving into the kitchen, beginning dinner, chatting with the wife when she’s off’a work, and having everything ready within thirty minutes, give or take. I’m like John “Hannibal” Smith – “I love it when a plan comes together!”
(Sorry if you are looking for dinner prepping tips… I have none other than buy more small ramekins.)
It’s having the ability to reliably and dependably provide food that my family wants, night after night. It’s about making people you care about happy. And we can sit around the table and talk and connect, and be together.
I know that I am not breaking new ground here, but I am a little surprised at home much I have come to enjoy cutting vegetables and measuring out herbs several hours ahead of time.
So, I was sitting in my car this morning because I needed to move it for the street sweeper, and my phone rang with a number that I didn’t recognize. I think I’m like most people and I don’t answer calls to numbers I don’t know. If it’s important, they’ll leave a message and I’ll call them back. But this morning, the number kept calling me, and didn’t leave a message. I mean, I’m pretty sure it was a spam/bot call and no big deal, yet there is still part of me that gets a little rush of anxiety when a call keeps calling. Like, if they keep calling it must be important. It has to be important if they called three times. This must be the most important call, because they called three times from Miami! But didn’t leave a message. That’s why I don’t answer.
I stayed up and watched the Cowboys play the Eagles. Actually, I watched until the weather delay, and at that point I called it. I was hoping that the Cowboys would win, but I wasn’t totally surprised that they lost. At the breakfast table this morning, the kid had questions about who won the game, which I found rather surprising. Normally, she doesn’t care about the Cowboys or football in general, but she was rather curious about the game, and if I watched it all. Then she wanted to know if I thought the Cowboys would win the Super Bowl, which I told her no, and that the team would be lucky to be above .500 this year. Then she wanted to know if I as going to watch all of their games, which I am. She was confused by this, and wanted to know why I was going to watch them if I thought they were going to lose. Because that’s want a fan of a team does; you suffer along with the team, and hope for next year. I really hoped that there was some important life lesson there that I was passing along, about loyalty, and commitment. But what I she made me feel was that I was about to waste a lot of time over the next couple of Sundays.
Boy, it is not a joke. The day after Labor Day, New York City fills back up with people. Twenty years I have been here, and I keep thinking that this maxim isn’t true. And every year I am amazed how on Labor Day, no one is around, and then the next day, people are everywhere. I really should know better.
The kid started in middle school this year, and I wrote awhile back about how she is adjusting to having more homework. And it’s going okay. We are still working and adjusting to the change.
One of the issues the kid has with doing her homework, is that she gets bored and her mind wanders. A totally normal reaction for a kid to have when it comes to reading about world history, or having to write a paragraph on the three different states of matter. What we are trying is the twenty minutes of work, and five minutes of break time. Back and forth until the home work is done. Seems to be working.
The funny thing that I discovered about myself is that I can’t sit down and work anymore. Good lord do I get distracted easily. Like really easily. See, I have been trying to work on this blog for thirty minutes now, but I keep on thinking of something else I need to do – which I have to go and do so I don’t forget.
Sure, I know that there are some of you out there that would call that procrastinating, and you might be right.
But what I feel myself experiencing is a lack of focus. Like, I sit down and I write a sentence, and then I start to wonder about… well, anything and everything. I kind’a find myself going to Wikipedia and just reading page after page about weird stuff. Or seeing if L.L Bean is selling any sweaters at a discount.
I feel that I have lost the skill of being able to sit down and focus for even twenty minutes.
I could blame my phone, and that would be accurate. Yet, don’t I have to take a little responsibility here? If I have a lack of focus, then I am the one who created this problem, right?
I had a humanities teacher in high school who explained existentialism to my class this way; “We are all free to make choices in our life. Nothing is determined. You can choose to be whoever you want. Being able to choose doesn’t always mean you will be happier.” At least that’s the notes I took in my first journal way back in 1995. I went back to this journal after I finished reading Miriam Toews’ story “Something Has Come to Light,” because not only did the story make me think about choices I’ve made, but also about living with those choices.
To sum this story up, perhaps a bit too simply: A grandmother has written a note/story for her grandchildren about a moment in her life where she should have said yes, but said no to the neighbor boy, Roland. Some years later the boy moves away, but dies, and his parents bury an urn that contain his ashes on their property. Sometime even later, after the parents on the neighboring property pass away and their land is to be sold, the grandmother sneaks onto the property at night, digs up the urn, and reburies it on her property. Every day, the grandmother has passed by the buried urn, and tells Roland she should have said yes. The letter/story ends with the grandmother asking the grandchild to dig up the urn and return it to Roland’s surviving sister, or if that’s too much to ask, leave him, and continue to tell him that grandma made a mistake and should have said yes.
I loved this story. And I loved how this story snuck up on me, how it placed itself in my head, and kept poking at me, telling me to enjoy it more. The language here is simple and to the point, which is what you would expect from a woman that has lived a simple but contented life. The way it was written reminded me of how the Midwestern women in my family spoke – there was a plainness to it, but that didn’t mean that the words didn’t have nuance and revelatory meaning to them. The grandmother is a woman who doesn’t complain, but also is tough and doesn’t put up with much either, yet will never be rude about it.
The story really is about Roland, and the affect he had on her life. Though the two of them weren’t close, according to the grandmother, you can tell that she had a deep appreciation for him. Roland was different from the other people in town. His great sin appears to be that he sat on the front row at concerts, had a gift for the piano as demonstrated with a concert he put on in town and which the grandmother saved a poster from. Then one day Roland rode up to the grandmother and asked if she wanted a ride, which she answered no. A decision she would regret as Roland moved away to England. The town never forgave him for leaving, and I sense that the grandmother never spoke up or out in Roland’s defense, but she lived with that regret. A regret that would possess her to the point that not only did she need to apologize to Roland for the rest of her life, but also to possess Roland for the remainder of her life.
What I find captivating about this story is that it isn’t necessarily a romantic bond between the grandmother and Roland. Though I think there is a tinge about, like a frosting, but it’s not the driving motivation. What I believe the story is telling me is that the grandmother is mourning the exact moment where her life could have gone in a different direction. That she could have been, or done, something different. But, and this is most important, she does not regret her life. I say this because the start of the story, the grandmother explains that she keeps all the pictures of her grandchildren in a photo album next to her bed; how she looks at them, most nights. This is the act of a woman appreciating the life she lived, and what her and her husband created in this world.
What I find Miriam Toews is asking me with “Something Has Come to Light” is can it be possible to love the life you led, but also mourn the moment when it could have gone in a different direction? Can you love a person who could have been your agent of change, while also not wanting to change? Can a paradox like this exist in a contented person?
Perhaps. Perhaps the grandmother never wanted to let go of that chance encounter, to say she was sorry to the one person who wasn’t like anyone else she ever knew. Ultimately, the grandmother made her choice, and she learned to live with it, and with regret at the same time.
