Exercise App Bitches

My physical therapist wanted me to log into an app for my exercises. Big brother has been reimagined.

This morning, I watched the app do my exercises.

"Get ready," said a disembodied voice with an English accent.

Why an English accent? Why not a guy with a French accent?

"Begin," she said and a video of a minion woman lying on a massage table ran in what seemed like extra-slow motion. I watched her stretch for a few minutes.

I just might be willing to lie down to stretch for a guy with a French accent.

I watched the minion stretch. Was she even moving? It was like watching grass grow.

"Take a rest," she said.

Thank you. I could use a rest. I went to bed late last night because Nick was sick and I stayed up and watched him cough and be nauseated. Then, when he trundled down the steps at 5:00 this morning, I woke up after four and a half hours of sleep, not enough to be cheerful to the new voice in my life with the English accent.

"Begin," she said again. 

"Fuck off," I replied. Nick looked up and then returned to his show. He understood the generic attitude toward the new world order at only 6:27 in the morning.

Then, while she directed her minion to stretch her lower trunk in Matrix-style slow motion, I let the dog out and stood at the screen to take a deep breath of morning air. I wondered if the hummingbirds finished drinking their sugar and were ready for a refill. A shot of sugar water sounded good about then. I'd already made Nick an omelet, cleaned the litter box, and taken out the garbage.

"Take a rest," she said as if I didn't really deserve one.

This woman was a nag, a fucking nag. And if I imagined correctly, she spoke using resting bitch face. How is it that I could picture a woman's face when I couldn't even see her and I was only listening to her voice?

Because I could.

Still, that one hamstring stretch, the one where I was supposed to straighten my leg and lean toward a flexed foot, that one looked like it would be a relief.

So, I did that stretch, but just on one side, and not in the perfect pose that my slow-motion minion model showed me. I never looked like the pictures that they showed in exercise programs.

Did you ever look between your elbows when you were doing one of those planks they showed on Pinterest? They really should show those things in an accurate way, from my perspective, with my clothes dragging the floor, my belly wobbling, and my calves quivering. Don't forget the beads of sweat that popped out and dripped down my face in a strange path. I was used to tears taking a certain route down my face. And if I were planking for an audience, the physical therapist would most certainly hover over me telling me to breathe when there was only a half a pint of air left in my squinched up lungs while I held my abs, under the wobbly belly, as tight as a drum.

Yeah, under all the loose folds of skin, I'm ripped, completely ripped. So are you, right?

I really hoped that the camera wasn't enabled during my use of this app. If the physical therapist could only see my selfie camera at work, she'd have seen me at the bottom of the screen, tap-tap-tapping away at my computer.

"Good job," my Brit woman exclaimed in a bored voice.

Why couldn't she sound like she meant it? Why did she have to talk in that tone of voice that said that even if I did lie down on the floor with all the dog hair I should have vacuumed yesterday, it would never have been good enough for her because of the way I really looked in my baggy clothes and my baggy skin? And she was going to make sure my physical therapist knew it. She must be related to the naggy-voiced computer woman at the grocery store who told me how to use the self-checkout lane when I was just a bit too slow at scanning that next item.

The bitches.

Thank you for listening, jb

Looking Into the Deep

I've been having trouble lately. I have. It's an imbalance in my life, not a catastrophe. But still...

So, last night, before I fell asleep, I asked for help. Some time in the early morning, I dreamed I found a kind man living on a boat on the river. He wasn't named, but he was Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad. He held my hand and it was warm and it helped. I leaned against his chest and it was so warm and comforting. I listened for the rumble of his belly.

He was a brown man.

He didn't rush me. I leaned there against him until I was almost filled up again. He just stood and let me lean on him. When I held up one hand, he held it.

Oh, I needed that.

I needed to be held and comforted. I really did. Thank you.

Then, I laid down on the platform at the back of his boat and looked into the water. Once in a while, I spit to see trout rise from the cool deep. They ate my spit. Ew.

We used to do that at the Marina at Rough River in Kentucky, spit into the water to see carp come up, curious about whether there were treats. We spit bits of our ice cream into the water for them. They were languid, well-fed fish, happy for the extra sweetness. Can fish taste sweetness?

This water was clearer than the water at Rough River. It was like our rivers here, a little bit tannin, but clear to the bottom. Still, it was amazing how the trout were camouflaged until they weren't.

After I looked at the fish, I read some of the books on the boat. There wasn't much stuff onboard except books. Books piled on shelves, sat in boxes, and on tables, all the knowledge in the Universe. The boat was bigger than it had at first seemed, a simple fishing boat with a small covered cabin. But I didn't feel crowded when I went inside.

It was heaven, as many books as I could read.

Suddenly, there were other children there, all curious about what I was reading. Icarus. Wasn't he the guy who flew too close to the sun and it melted the wax holding his feathers together?

One of the kids decided to look it up online instead of the big dictionary on the table. When he clicked the word on his phone, a white bird the size of a man unfolded his wings somewhere on shore. He was malevolent and with the quick reference, could find us where we hid.

More importantly, he could find the book.

The book in my hands began to crumble to dust.

Desperately, I went back to reading before it was completely gone. Some of the words were saved, but it was too late for most of the book.

We needed to read, to read as much as we could of the existing books because the ones that weren't being read crumbled into dust. The unused words disappeared. Without the books, chaos would come.

Shakespeare, Gilgamesh, Faulkner, The Odyssey, even Lindy West, Walter Kamau Bell, David George Haskell. One by one, the books began to flake apart and disintegrate.

Some of the kids didn't want to read. I read as fast as I could. Civilization depended on it.

And then I woke up, wishing I had more time to lean against the man's warm chest, to hold his hand, to look into the deep of the water, to read what seemed like infinite books before they crumbled away in my hands.

I had asked for God's help. That was it. That was the message. Hold hands, look into the deep, read.

Good message.

Grandma's Coffee Cup

I'm running a writing workshop on Friday for the kids I tutor.

I realized that I'm doing it for me when one of the props I felt I must bring was my grandma's coffee cup. Yes, I will be the one writing about that cup. No one else will choose it. No one else would pick it out of a lineup of good candidates. What could you possibly say about an old coffee cup?

These kids were raised using mugs not cups, big mugs that could host dirt and a hearty petunia, stainless steel skinny mugs designed to slip into their car's cup holder, heavy mugs with photos of T-ball players who have since grown up, awkward and colorful mugs with swirly patterns and the word 'peace' painted on each side, mugs with snarky comments printed on them that have long since stopped making them laugh. These kids might not even recognize a low-rise porcelain cup, one that contained barely a measured cup, with a delicate white handle that you have to pinch between your thumb and forefinger to use.

Those kids don't remember that pink and white porcelain cup set on a saucer for meals of homegrown beans, tomatoes, corn, watermelon, and blackberry cobbler. Those kids won't know that the cup with an unstained twin means a moment or two, unrushed, at the dining table for a heart-to-heart in between planting, weeding, picking, snipping, snapping, and canning homegrown fruits and vegetables. A cup of tea and a salad lunch with Grandma was an event, not fancy, but a lesson in feeding yourself the freshest food that mattered to your body. It could begin with laughter and end with tears, the good kind, the kind of tears that melted your heart, made you feel pressed into the red and white softness of Grandma's favorite cotton dress.

That cup was the first washed and the first to be set back on the table with its saucer, always ready for the next moment when it was needed. That cup was witness to Grandma's long life, almost the beginning and almost to the end. I'm not exactly sure when Grandpa gave Grandma her good set of dishes, the ones with a farm scene in the center and acorns around the edges, but she used it every day that I was there. I use them now. I like to think that Grandma wouldn't mind that I use one of the tiny bowls to feed the kitten, or that I brought up the chipped dessert plate to use first to see if it would tolerate the dishwasher or go pale and craze in its heat. I haven't chipped or broken one yet, thankfully.

When I pack for the writing workshop, I'll bring a birdhouse that was never offered to the birds, a dried starfish, a Ball jar, a sand dollar, a pine cone, Gumby, and a bowl of fruit. But I know, when I pack up that cup and saucer to go to the workshop, it is not for my students to ponder. It will be for me. With that porcelain cup, I'll remember a worn red and white dress that smelled of Jergen's lotion, a white apron, a vegetable garden with a single row of sunflowers and dahlias, a watermelon so ripe it cracks open when it's tapped, a large tin tub, a toilet that rocked a little when you sat on it, a kitchen that smelled of coffee, bacon, and homemade bread, a house with a shaded front porch, a porch with a swing that creaked, a wooden screen door that screeched when it was opened and slapped shut again, flyswatters, a long ash hanging from Grandpa's cigarette, a short front lawn so that Uncle Buddy could stop in his car on the wrong side of the road without getting out, hang his tanned left arm out of the driver's-side window, shade his bright blue eyes, and talk without any other cars honking him away. I can remember the horses that stood in the field across the road, the way they swished their tails and reached for the taller, tender grass across the barbed wire fence. I can remember a whole lifetime ago, to a time that I was the same age as these kids I pretend to teach.

So what? So what if I'm running a workshop intended solely for me?

Thank you for listening, jb