Equinox

There's this woman who works at the gym we go to. She's there pretty much every morning starting at 5. Every once in a while someone else is working, but it's usually this gal. She's in her 60s, most likely, and looks great with it.

And she's a talker. She loves noise.

Full disclosure: while I'm a reasonably social person under most circumstances, I'm not so much at 6 in the morning. My brain isn't firing all neurons yet - only those needed to get me out of bed and to the gym. When I'm lifting weights, I like to concentrate on that. I don't want to chat.

She does.

I know a lot of people do like to socialize at the gym. I see them standing around and talking for 1/2 hour or more. Me - I want to be there and gone in 1/2 hour.

I'm grumpy that way.

I'm grumpy enough that if she comes over to where I'm working out, I won't really engage in her conversational gambits. I'll smile, nod, give her the huh, go figure. David, being much nicer, will talk to her, which just encourages her. Then he grumbles to me later.

Today she went over to where a client was working with a personal trainer, saying something about dancing at nightclubs. I heard the client gal say in a joking voice "hey, you're distracting my trainer - go away!"

Nicely done, I thought.

But then Chatty Sue came over to us, where David and I were working on neighboring machines.

"Today is the last day of summer!" she announced.

David said, "Oh, is it?"

"Yes! Isn't that terrible!"

I couldn't help myself. "It's the autumnal equinox," I said, "it's a day of balance."

"Yeah - I hate to see summer go," she complained. And proceeded to tell us about her tomatoes which, incidentally, she'd told us about before.

I didn't try again.

To think of today as the last day of summer is silly to me. For some of us, the weather lingers hot, for others, snow has already fallen and summer is long gone. The division of the seasons is a mark on the calendar. But the equinox is about the balance of light and dark. Exactly poised. It's a moment of equilibrium, the pause, the imperceptible hesitation of the pendulum before it swings back the other direction.

It's a day of possibility.

I Know You Are, but What Am I?

Pacer Guy was back today.

I wouldn't call him a rec center regular, because he's not there every morning. He's not even there on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings, like the three Walker Ladies who spend more time yakking while they "stretch out" than they do on the weight machines or on the walking track, where they insist on walking three abreast, which annoys the people trying to jog in the outside jogging lane.

No, Pacer Guy shows up more or less randomly. Often on Friday mornings, however. He's distinctive in the lemon green ball cap that never comes off his head. And his behavior.

Pacer Guy had just gotten off the leg press machine when we arrived. Knowing from past experience that this is his favorite machine, with which he has a tumultuous relationship, I took the opportunity to get on the machine, hoping to use it before he returned. Cuz that's what he does -- he apparently leaves. Sometimes he wanders around the central pulley machine to stand and watch Fox news for a while. (This is Wyoming: of course they play Fox News in the gym.) Other times he'll head off down the hall, past the basketball courts, through the glass doors to the atrium. I've seen him get all the way to the front doors -- a straight visual shot from the weight room -- before he turns around and comes back.

As I worked my leg press repetitions, Pacer Guy circled back a couple of times and I realized he wasn't done. In some ways, it seems he never is. I finished and he jumped on, quickly shifting the weight pins to his preferred load. He did three or four reps. And headed out the doors.

He came back, of course. Pacer Guy does this most with the leg press machine. But, when he was safely on the biceps curl, apparently done with the butterfly one (can you tell I've never bothered to learn the actual names for these?), I started in with that. Every time I stood up to increase the weight, he jumped up from the biceps machine, only to retire back to his seat when I saw I wasn't abandoning the field. Finally, he popped up and paced off somewhere. I finished and Curiously Tense Blond Jogger Girl got on. Pacer Guy returned, saw someone ELSE was on the machine and took off again. Then New Overweight Guy, who's being very dedicated and earnest so far, marking all of his weights and reps on the spreadsheet the personal trainer gave him, used the machine. This was the last straw for Pacer Guy, who disappeared after that. I thought he'd left, but David, who was dodging the Walker Ladies on the track, reported that Pacer Guy had gone upstairs to stalk around the treadmills and rearrange the Pilates balls.

Yesterday I went to Denver to visit my mom. She's back in the neighborhood for the summer, so we went for lunch at the Bent Noodle and hit Nick's Paradisical Garden Center for supplies: pink impatiens, tadpoles and water hyacinths. She said she didn't know Ruth has dementia. And we talked about how hard those debilitating chronic diseases are on the caretaker. I saw how it drained her, during Leo's long decline.

"I don't think Mother had Alzheimers though," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because she always knew who we were. She didn't forget things. It was more like...like her anxiety overwhelmed everything else so she couldn't function."
"That's true."
"I find myself doing that," she admitted.
"Hell -- I do it!" I told her. "I suppose it's just a constant battle not to let emotions overwhelm what's rational.

By 6:30, the weight room had cleared out. The machines quiet, ready for the next wave.

The Treadmill

Long a symbol of going nowhere, the treadmill seems a creature of tedium rather than agent of chaos that can unseat you. This is the treadmill's secret weapon. It camoflages itself as the slow and steady, the reliable pace at a given incline. It lulls you with its consistency. Waits for that moment, the brief break of inattention to attack.

This morning, David was running next to me on the treadmill at a steady pace, when he snagged his hand in the cord running from his MP3 player to his headphones. The MP3 fell, hit the belt, which zinged the little box like a bullet. I heard the SNAP crack through my own music and looked over to meet the equally startled gaze of the guy on the elliptical on the other side of David. Between us, David also looked around for his player, and promptly zinged off the back of the treadmill himself.

I'd done it once, too. One of the first times I went to the rec center, back when my lack of fitness and excess body fat confined me to walking the treadmill. I walked slowly, steadily. It was pretty dull, really. When I decided to pull off my sweatshirt, I didn't give it a second thought. Of course I can keep walking at a normal pace, especially one regulated for me, while pulling off a shirt.

But as soon as my eyes were muffled -- I zinged off the end of the treadmill. Nearly into the laps of some innocent people walking around the track. I flailed a bit, still caught in my sweatshirt. A bit confused about what happened, but still pretty much on my feet. Behind me, the treadmill softly chuckled to itself.

I suppose it's a lesson in attention. That even the most dull and reliable features of our lives can suddenly throw us to the side in a heap. Perhaps it's the most dull and reliable that bear the most watching. Those things that become so familiar we cease to pay attention to them. We get comfortable, trust them to pace along at exactly the settings we've previously designated and turn our attention to other things.

One of these days, we'll know better.

Swim Boys

10:00 am, the first Saturday of the month, so the mournful wail of the tornado sirens drifts over town. Dogs lift their heads to howl along. In the summer I'd be already outside in the garden. Instead, the January cold keeps us in. Wind gusting along the eaves. Only a test.

They were having a swim meet at the Rec Center this morning. Always a bad omen: yellow school buses in the parking lot. They cheerfully list the counties across Wyoming. Sweetwater. Fremont. Campbell. Former Governor Mike Sullivan called Wyoming a small town with very long streets. To have a sporting event, schools must compete against schools from across the state, not from across the city. Only a couple of towns have more than one high school. School buses in the parking lot mean kids swarming the weight machines, the walking/running track, traveling in packs to look cool on a visit to the "big city."

On Saturdays, the Rec Center opens at 8:00 am. We sleep in and head over there around eight o'clock. Saturdays is our treadmill workout. David and I like the side-by-side treadmills that overlook the pool through tall glass windows. During my twenty minute run, I watched the families assemble, settle into the bleachers and the steamy warmth. Not a bad place to be on a sere winter day.

Bleachers are the natural habitat of teenagers. While the adults perch uneasily on the hard plastic benches, the young men -- this meet seemed to be all young men -- sprawled. The accepted pose required at least three tiers: Feet on one, butt on the middle and elbows on the highest. An elegant laid-back pose, especially well adapted to being shirtless, which they all were. Little kings, they surveyed their territory with cocky athleticism, reclining so that all might admire them.

But I felt no admiration. I've never quite gotten the stories of the older woman and the teenage lover. These high school boys are no more attractive to me now than they were when I was in school myself. I think that for me it’s because attraction to a person is all about the personality and character, which are not yet formed in most of these guys. Sure we can talk about a man with nice hands or strong shoulders or intense eyes. But in the end, it’s about his presence. His manliness.

The romance authors talk about the alpha male. As the genre dabbles in other areas, growing and drifting into science fiction, mystery, thriller, even mainstream fiction, those who work in the field struggle to define the genre. One particular I see most often is there must be an alpha male. That and an “emotionally satisfying ending.” The Happily Ever After (HEA) is no longer a prerequisite. But the alpha male: a must.

Which is interesting because, biologically speaking, alpha males are the exception, not the rule. There is only one alpha male wolf in the pack. There is only one alpha stag in the herd. As females, is that our biological imperative – to seek out the alpha male and ignore all of the secondary bachelor males? Is that what romance is about, the animal drive and nothing else?

Perhaps there’s something else to look for in the man of our romantic dreams: someone between the unformed boy and the elusive alpha male. After all, in nature, the alpha leads for only a short time before he’s taken down by the young males waiting restlessly in the wings for their turn at the females.