New 2008 Summer Olympics Event: Extreme Gardening

I never hurt this badly when I was training for triathlons. Even now I do workouts to videos by those fitness Nazis Cathe Friedrich and David Kirsch; and yes, my heart rate ascends and I curse them as I perform their punishing machinations and contortions like some trained seal. Sometimes I’ll even follow one of those Bataan death workouts with a 5-mile run, which can be a lot of damned work. Once I’m finished, I stretch, the endorphins spin around my blood stream, and we’re all good. Ahhhhh….

Not so gardening. I’m amazed that they haven’t made an advanced workout video that includes shoveling mulch, hoisting peat moss bales, wrestling uncooperative gas-powered equipment, and performing endless squats while weeding. Unlike the results of tortuous traditional workouts, I did not spring out of bed this morning ready to do it again. Due to the hours of yesterday’s yard work, I whimpered as I gingerly edged off the mattress, crab-walked into the bathroom, sucked down four Ibuprofen, then crawled back into the sack until I absolutely had to get ready for work.

The implements of this seemingly benign pastime are enough to prepare for guerilla warfare: shovels, pitchforks (Satan’s favorite—and now I have some feel for the association), axes, pickaxes, and all manner of tools with long and twisted prongs that look like they could be used to gut the enemy. I always thought gardening was for the meek and the grandma who had no strength left for anything else. Now I’m discovering that these gardeners are undercover Hercules and Xena Warrior Princesses who may be raising their own armies. Or at least indulging in the masochism of training for extreme sports. Stay tuned for Beijing 2008.

Beware the Flamenco

I am in love. Each night before bed I have been viewing a brief interlude of “Flamenco”, Carlos Saura’s 1995 documentary; and it has taken on the guilty-pleasure proportions of a slightly illicit assignation. Conventional wisdom undoubtedly would interpret this in a way that mirrors my initial expectation of lithe, sinewy bodies cutting staccato swaths across the floor. There are certainly those. But the performances that have captured my very being bring beauty and sensuality from unexpected places and take it to an all-new level.

The singing. I never knew singing was a part of flamenco. Singing like I’ve never heard before. Singing coming from enormous mouths with teeth that beg for dentistry and set in fleshy faces carved with scars and wrinkles of time and experience. Singing that feels and sounds more like it is ripped from their hearts and lungs and souls than merely vibrated across vocal cords. Singing in words I can barely understand but in a language of passion and pain that is universal and makes my solar plexus vibrate and my eyes tear.

As I watch and listen, I feel as though I am pulled into a vortex of sound and emotion with the impact of a high-voltage wire—so intense I can barely stand it, and so compelling I cannot let go. I put off the inevitable as long as I possibly can….

Finally and regretfully, I turn off the VCR. I adjust my pillow. And I do my best to sleep while simmering with anticipation for tomorrow’s rendezvous.

iVivo!

Eleven days ago I was foraging about for a new adventure and decided that Spain in July 2007 is the ticket. That will be perfect timing to do Running of the Bulls in Pamplona; and in the meantime, I can begin to learn flamenco dancing and expand my Spanish to include more than one verb tense. It’s the Swiss army knife of adventure packages.

Within 15 minutes of the decision, I had a local flamenco dance teacher on the phone. Unfortunately, her current class is full and the next one doesn’t start until September. (Come September: Bessie bar the door!)

Within two hours I was leaving the library loaded down with videos of Spain and a flamenco dance documentary, tour books, and Spanish language CDs. Within six days I was sitting in Spanish class, discovering that I remembered more than I thought and happy to be trilling “r’s” again.

I fully plan on being in Spain 350 days from this moment. But if for some reason that plan doesn’t come to fruition, the adventure is in play now and lighting up every minute of every day. As Ralph Blum said, “We are not doers, we are deciders. Once we decide, the doing is easy.”

The North Star Spousal Unit

Yesterday was my parents’ 67th wedding anniversary. That’s an amazing number, made even more incredible by the fact that it took them 55 years to start getting along. Considering my matrimonial record, that perseverance gene is not one I inherited.

Last night I talked to my mom and learned that they’d had a wonderful day together, reminiscing over old times and old friends, later having dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. It all sounded so sweet. The two have become such a unit that it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. My mother even seems to have forgotten that she likes French dressing. On my visit there last month, I noticed her dousing her salad with bleu cheese dressing, my dad’s lifelong favorite.

I wouldn’t have hung in there and waited for 55 years for someone to stop sniping at me, but the result of my parents’ persistence—or stubbornness—is something strong and North-star-like. One of those few treasured things that can be counted on as unchanging, that aids navigation in rough waters, and gives courage as it lights up the dark.

Feet in the Soil

On my recent road trip to the wilds of Oklahoma and Texas, I reunited with a high school friend I hadn’t seen in three and ahalf decades. In 1967-68 when I was a freshman and Richard a senior at Guymon High School, we were in band together. Band rehearsals, marching drills, and football games gave me the opportunity to develop an unrequited crush on him and for him to torment me with the glee of an older brother. Surprisingly, he invited me to his senior prom, to which I couldn’t go because of the rules of the whacko Nazarene Church I attended and the parents that made me attend. We did go to the ersatz alternative event the church put on. He moved to Amarillo right after his graduation, and I only saw him once more shortly before my own graduation.

Despite the intervening years, from the first hello we didn’t miss a beat, and the conversation flowed easily. Like me, Richard has lived all over the country since those times, with his residence now in New Mexico. We discovered commonalities that we had never known during our high school acquaintance, such as the fact that he and I had spent our earlier formative years in Stinnett and Borger, respectively, small towns in the Texas Panhandle that were only 12 miles apart. And that after high school and college, we had both lived in Amarillo at different times.

We made our Amarillo history tangible by driving around to the different places we’d each lived. There was the house for which Richard's parents had paid $7200 while he was still in high school in Guymon, and where they lived until his mother died. His father continued to live there until he could no longer care for himself. Not far from there was the first house Richard had purchased himself, for the tidy sum of $12,850.

Next on this slightly off-beat Tour of Homes was the shack on Arthur street where I had lived for $95/month, and even that was more than I could afford in 1975. It looked like it was about to fall down, but was nevertheless in better shape than when I had lived there. I felt a little melancholy as I related how hard those times were. I had just graduated from college so full of hope and sure a great job and enormous success were waiting for me. It didn’t work out quite that way, at least not for a long time. Not then, and not in Amarillo.

We drove by various duplexes Richard had occupied when he was in college. We talked about our friends, families, hopes, dreams, and a few of the disappointments back then. As we drove down Amarillo Boulevard, I was reminiscing about eating at Ding How’s Chinese Restaurant from the time I was a small child when my family would come to “The Big City” to shop. That was back in the day when eating at a Chinese restaurant was exotic stuff. At that moment we drove by Ding How’s. It was faded, ramshackle, and closed with weeds growing in the parking lot.

Maybe it sounds depressing, but that tour of our past lives in Amarillo was wonderful. Just being able to share that history is a big deal. How can you explain Guymon, Oklahoma or Amarillo, Borger, and Stinnett Texas to someone who doesn't have that red earth running through their veins? Let alone feel that someone with a vastly different background can understand the lives and pains and victories experienced there without the visceral knowledge of those areas? Even as I drove back to Wisconsin, my adopted homeland that I love like no other, I felt enveloped by that sharing of times and events that meant as much and went as deep as the roots of the Texas mesquite trees we grew up with.