Say What You Think!

So I'll get to the meaning of THIS picture in a second. I was at the office of this bone guy, whose waiting room as I walked in held just one elderly couple. The husband of the pair was filling out his wife’s health history on a clipboard. “Knee problems,” he told me cheerily, nodding toward his spouse, who within the space of 30 seconds had thrown back her head, closed her eyes and begun performing an aria of happy snores.Just as suddenly, she snapped awake and shot me an assessing look.“Nice you clothes,” she told to me in a heavy, Slavic-sounding accent.I glanced down to see what I was wearing, because you know how it is: you’re not always sure just what you’ve ended up putting on in the morning. “Well, thanks!” I said.I knew I would miss my visit to the Y that day, so instead of donning my usual crummy workout gear, I had on a forest green boot-length corduroy skirt very wide at the hem and a fur jacket that I have owned since the impenitent, over-the-top 80s when I found it for 60 bucks in an antique store down the road.“All my life I work in clothes,” she said. “I am knowing good clothes.”I would have asked more about that, but just then I was called into one of the examination rooms of this new-to-me doctor, who scrutinized my bent toy kite of a spine and asked about my daily life.I mentioned the Zumba classes I take thrice-weekly at the local Y.“Zumba?!” he repeated. “Zumba’s all wrong for you. You can’t be sending your thoracic region in one direction and your hips in the other! No more Zumba!”“No more Zumba? “ I squeaked. “It’s the only thing I do that makes my back pain stop!’“It’s CAUSING your back pain.”“I don’t think so.”“I think so.”"What happened to ‘Movement is life’?” I said.“What happened to ‘Listen to your doctor’?” he said. We looked at each other for a beat. Then, “Is this our first fight?” I said. “Listen the dancing is mostly salsa, where you keep your chest fairly still and just send your hips out to the right and the left.” He shook his head. We talked a little more, then he wrote me a prescription for physical therapy and suggested I also see a back surgeon. Fat chance I’m having back surgery, I thought to myself.“He’s a surgeon, you know, and a prominent one,” he said. “He’ll hurry into the room surrounded by younger doctors. Don’t be afraid to slow him down. Make him answer your questions. Stand your ground.”“I’m thinking that won’t be a problem for you,” he added, smiling. I smiled too, thanked him, and after we shook hands I returned to the waiting room, where the woman and her husband still sat in their chairs. The woman got right back to work examining me. “Good clothes,” she nodded as much to herself as to me. I looked down at myself more self-consciously this time, and picked up the end of the dark-green, tan and cream-colored scarf I had thrown around the neck of my jacket.“The scarf isn't right though, is it? I tried to find a better scarf but I don't seem to have one.”“No,” she said. “Scarf no good. The rest OK. Nice you clothes,” she said again. “Happy to meet you!” exclaimed her husband and with that we all bowed to one another and said our farewells - but not before I thought to myself how much I do appreciate frankness, wherever I chance to encounter it.

SO Cold!

How cold was it this week in my part of the world? So cold the flashers were describing themselves.So cold the posts of your earrings were turning your ears into something resembling two frozen apricots stuck to the side of your head. It was so cold it the fillings in your teeth stabbed you with an iron pain the second you opened your mouth. So cold the tiny hairs in your nose grew tiny icicles.I didn’t leave the house for a full 36 hours during the worst of it.I needed to buy milk. “Forget the milk,” David said. I needed to go to the Apple store and have one of those nice One-to-One sessions with my new Mac. “Forget the Apple store!” I told myself and rescheduled for next week.I needed to work out at the Y, which sits on a windy hilltop 100 yards from where I would have to park my car. “The heck with the Y for now," I also thought and went to the third floor and made myself get on that treadmill that Dave's pal Frank talked him into buying 15 years ago.Being inside did have a few good effects: I cleaned. I sorted stuff. I made and hung new curtains for the living room windows which up until now looked like a face with no eyebrows.See? This is Before: Pretty blah, right?And this is After: pop!Anyway ....We could only bear to stay downstairs until around 4pm when everything on that floor grows arctic. (It’s an old house, what can I say, with a three-story hall that carries the heat RIGHT out through the roof.)We ate supper every night on the bed and were under the covers by 7:00.It actually wasn’t a bad week, take it all around, and today they say the temperatures will moderate.Sigh. I hope so. Tell you the truth my ears are still kind of a funny color.But at least the spider webs over the windows are gone.And running on the treadmill was sort of OK but the truth is I can't wait to get back up on that window hilltop for Zumba's particular brand of torture

Lazy Time of Year

It’s hard to take time off from writing a blog.Sure, you’re your own boss with a blog but I myself feel so uneasy when I don’t have something lined up to post at dawn of the next day. I feel like I’ve gone to bed without saying my prayers or something.Still, it was nice over the last 48 hours to vow to take a little time away; also to have made a small mini-rule about just NOT GOING to that gym that pulls me towards it like some irresistible kind catnip, whether I want to be drawn there or not. It’s the Nia and the Hip Hop Cardio, and mostly the Zumba that I love. To move like that! To music! With others!This week so far I have mostly just done a little fake swimming, with this little guy.

I went to sit shiva with a family recently bereaved.I sent three thank you notes and mailed two gifts.I bought curtains in a room long crying out for curtains and then became so obsessed with the fact that they’re five inches too short that I went BACK to the store, bought a fifth curtain to cannibalize for its extra yardage, and spent two hours yesterday measuring and sewing, getting ready to perform that grafting operation, which I couldn’t undertake today because I somehow found myself out of common pins and only a fool sews without first pinning.Over this past weekend as the guest of some good friends on Cape Cod I did a lot of eating, basking, reading, eating and more eating. I’m trying that Tim Ferris diet (which deserves its own post and will doubtless get it soon enough as I begin to turn into a black bean, having eaten so many of them.)And this Next weekend I hope to be going out this wee bobbing cork of a dinghy I bought a few years ago in spite of family’s derisive laughter. It’s got this little sewing machine of a motor but you can go right out all by yourself in the middle of a body of water and look up at the sky and think "Take ME Now"! It’s the same feeling I while flat on my back and bobbing on a raft. The boat’s motor is so quiet that the last time I went out in it I think I maybe tied it up with the engine still running. Anyway recharging the battery took forever but hey: live and learn.Right this second and also over the past 48 hours I've been teaching myself about eye makeup. I don’t think I’m gettin’ away with it exactly. I may have to file it under Looks You’re Probably Too Old For but it’s been fun playing with it and isn’t that what summer is for?August now. Hate to think the long days might be ending, but they aren’t really doing that yet. Not yet, anyway. Not today.

DanceMorphosis

No more Nautilus for me, or Aerobics either. For sure no more of the private hell of  Step Aerobics.Depending on what day of the week it is you’ll find me either clenching my abdominals or dancing . At the Y. With a roomful of other people, including a 90-year-old who can do  a better imitation of a soft pretzel than anyone else I know.Often I do  Zumba, which is  fast-paced Latin dancing mostly: Meringue, Mambo, Salsa, with Dances of Many Other Times and Places thrown in. I also take a Hip Hop class each week and another class with a lot of Bollywood, which is actually a lot more like Hip Hop than you might imagine. (In fact click the link below to see some adorable Bollywood dancers:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aumLcSU3-g]But what I really really really love these days is the dance technique called Nia which you could say is what you get when roomfuls of  otherwise normal adults take leave of their senses entirely . Go in past the naked-lady James Bond silhouettes  to the clip of me sitting in a dance studio and speaking German! The actual movements start about a minute into the video but don’t I look awesome ? Thanks to my new regimen at the Y I'm now multilingual - AND I have no tummy at all![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQNPZdXtc0k&feature=related]