Feeling it

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling .... fine?"

But I wasn't really sure. 

I was lifting things. Tensing other things. Releasing them all at once. 

I felt like it was going okay.

My daughter was watching. Like a hawk. Pushing me past my comfort level. Out of the nest.

"No-no-no. Not like that," she said with the conviction of a cane-tapping dance instructor ... like Debbie Allen ... in the cinematic adaptation of the glamorous life of students at a famed NYC performing arts high school ... circa 1978.

If this were a dance class, I'd have already failed. I never did figure out whether I was supposed to backpack or floss.

But this is different. This looks familiar. Possible. Do-able, even. 

My new fitness guru has recently turned seventeen; jams dirty socks in between the couch cushions as she's watching TV; leaves half-empty cans of seltzer everywhere, yet can't find the remote control anywhere.

She is also a dedicated participant in all things virtual ... including physical education.

And of course, this girl of mine is my personal hero ... saving me from myself and the infinite indignities I would inflict by surreptitiously joining her virtual gym class from the next room, not nearly as off-camera as I think I am.

"Mom! People could see you!"

Instead, she promises to give me private lessons at a time when no other soul in the world could possibly be watching.

In my case, classes start at 10 p.m., after she's done with homework and most of her friends have shuttered their windows on Snapchat.

I don't mind the late hour. The darker the house is when I crouch on the floor the better. The dust bunnies under the couch won't be as much of a distraction as they would be if I could see them.

Honestly, though, I wasn't prepared for the caliber of teaching my daughter would extend in these private lessons, nor was I ready for how tough she'd be. 

As she guided me through a series of rolling planks, quickly moving from one side and back to the other, she thought she could trust me to carry on for "six minutes" while she ambled away to attend to some important conference call, to which students are apparently not privy.

"After six minutes, start on lunges."

She can't be serious. Six minutes of planking?

I do six repetitions. Two per plank, and call it: per plunked!

She frowns a little and shrugs her shoulders in acceptance.

Squats then?

She stands next to me and demonstrates: feet planted; resistance band, stretches; sit back into your squat; release.

I do exactly as she's instructed.

Or at least I think I have perfectly mirrored her instructions.

"You aren't getting low enough.

You stand like this: feet apart, resistance band above your knees, now deep bend, push your bottom out, sit down and back.

"Now, let's take it from the top. One hundred crunches!"

She can't be serious? 

I'm not sure I'll be feeling fine, tomorrow.

A parade of lights

A string of red and green colored bulbs - the plastic kind illuminated by a watch-sized battery encased in a circuit-box clasp - dangled from my neck, blinking on and off, as I jogged toward the center of town.

I sounded like a toddler running out of their bedroom toward an adult party with a Christmas toy on the fritz.

My nighttime running intention to be highly visible to traffic always gets inflated by an innate inclination towards becoming a potentially hazardous spectacle.

Maybe it was the light-up earrings, attached to the elastic straps of a face mask and tucked under the earflaps of a faux fur hat that put me on this path toward ridiculousness. But a friend bringing a stack of pajamas leftover from a family photo session last Christmas probably sent me over that edge.

"Here. Put this on," she asked politely, shoving a bright red trap-bottomed onesie in my direction. I reached out to take it, fumbling a flashlight and setting off my watch. "If we're all going out, we are going all out."

And so I did what any dutiful friend would do: I added another layer of insanity to my appearance.

Truth be told, I'd been thinking about this moment all week. Not about the outfit ... or the route, which was a nighttime tour of holiday decorations that had been mapped and cataloged by our local neighborhood association. The circuitous route would take us away from elegant loops, adding in zig-zags and even some back-tracking.

No. I was worried mostly about the wisdom of meeting as a group during a pandemic, despite being outdoors, naturally distanced by pace, and masked the entire five miles.

"Wait ... I don't remember ANYONE saying anything about five miles."

No one had "signed on" since it wasn't official. It was more like a wink and a nod with a time and a place.

The idea that "other people were doing it," as evidenced by festive photographs I'd seen running clubs post on facebonk, ran in a similarly inelegant loop in my thoughts, narrated sarcastically by my mother's voice, which was clearly mentioning something about following friends and the proximity cliffs.

No matter how we make this endeavor fit the prevailing guidance - staying outside, breaking into small groups, remaining masked and distanced the whole time - will always feel tight under the weight of the word essential.

I've done little in the last nine months that feels as essential as running alone.

No one needs to run at night with their friend who may or may not be wearing elf ears.

And yet there we were an irregular parade of moving lights headed in various directions on the same path.

A few bobbing noggins track light beams straight ahead. It relaxes me to realize I'd have to sprint to catch them. Another few keep a similar pace a half a block back. 

Fifty minutes pass as quickly as the five miles of light strings, inflatable winter scenes, and sparkling paper luminaries. We all leave without hugging or even high fives and head back to the comfort of our own homes.

The elation I feel as I walk home feels like more than enough to get through the rest of this dark winter.

Winter wonders

 I trace the delicate glitter trails that line the shiny baubles as I hang them from the porch railings. The sensation is oddly pleasing, as the warm, sandpaper scruff of a cat's lick. I worry, though, I may absentmindedly rub away too much of the holiday sparkle.

The wind threatens to upend my designs, crashing the orbs into each other and maybe into oblivion, a place we all seem to have forgotten to fear until lately.

Now that we are hovering on the edge of more isolation as this new wave of pandemic settles in. 

It's like a malevolent stalker made even more powerful by our tendencies to put as much

of the onus on the victim as we can pile. 

You can feel its putrid breath on the back of your neck, and the pointy fingers of blame jabbing in all directions.

The squirrels in our minds frantically scramble to hide precious nuts so's we can find them and feast one dark winter night in our not-to-distant future.

None of us want to recreate the patterns we adhered to last spring when we hunkered down behind locked doors, many of us with lofty goals of learning a second language or baking the perfect loaf of sourdough. 

A few weeks later and we

were all measuring our success by whose supply closets still bulged with the most toilet paper or which of us had drained our own personal swamps of booze. 

My online language teaching app has sent me a letter outlining how much of an actual disappointment I turned out to be as a virtual pupil.

But I have excelled in some efforts. 

In addition to the nightly cocktail, I have picked up another addiction: a daily run known as "streaking" to its devotees and "an-injury-waiting-to-happen" to just about everyone else. 

My kids have picked up cooking for themselves and answering the phone when it rings, two seemingly dissimilar pastimes that have roughly the same level of chaotic aftermath: the former in the shape of literal mess from dishes and spills left to harden; and the latter in the form of potentially important messages left unrecorded and unremembered.

Until several nights after it may have been relevant: 

 "Oh, mom. Some doctor's office called like three days ago. Said something about confirming an appointment for someone. I don't remember."

I don't have the stamina to hang on to anger, which may be the direct result of the five-mile run completed on day 196. 

We did manage to plant the light cannon in the front yard so it can shoot dancing pinpoint laser lights onto the house, and we can pretend we exerted some measure of holiday effort. We forgot to turn it on that first night, having lost both the instructions for programming and daylight for inspecting the switches.

A few days later, after fixed the short circuit, our light cannon's green and red lights flickered like fireflies on the ceiling, delightfully dancing a technological tribute to a different kind of holiday sparkle visiting us now from our memories of the summer sky. 

The warm up

I have reached the age when all the things that could misalign seem to do so midway through slumber.

Thankfully, I have also reached the stage of development when my body tends to wake me up before that fateful twist or turn in my sleep, presenting me with the insomniac assisted ability to thwart fate.

I'm not sure how it is that I can also drink fully caffeinated beverages before bed and still manage to fall asleep at will.

But that is for another time, perhaps.

Maybe you don't need to know this either, but it is 1:30 a.m. where I am now, in bed staring up at a ceiling, contemplating a shift in position that could have a far-reaching impact on the remainder of the day.

Two and a quarter minutes ago I was fully asleep. And two minutes from now I might be heading back to dreamland or I might be heading into a world of pain. It all depends on a rotation I literally used to be able to do in my sleep.

But no longer.

Before reaching for the pocket research library ... the thing that I typo-away on for most of my waking existence ... I will first make some tentative stretches of the arms and legs, including a more deliberate run-through of the alphabet with both feet.

I carve lowercase and uppercase letters into the air, just to be safe.

I press down on what I imagine is my seventh cervical vertebrae, though it could be the last one of the thoracic, I've only surveyed Anatomy at the M. Siobhan School of Medicine at Google. I haven't committed to immersive study. 

It turns out I only dreamed it was stiff. 

I continue on with the small movements, the ones that I imagine are oiling this old machine.

My left ankle makes a satisfying snap as I exhale. My right ankle never makes any sound at all, which is probably best but ultimately a letdown.

I turn my head and experience a painless line of crackle, like school children lining up for dismissal. It seemed so exciting once. 

I am ready to attempt the toss part of my turn, which starts with an assistive propping of weight by my right elbow.

If I am successful, my hips and knees will come along without complaint.

There aren't miscalculations so much as always ready to “tear” part of “wear and tear.”

I hold my breath and, keeping caution out of the wind, I tumble slowly into this practiced roll.

I land in my new position without any more trauma than just the realization there are five more hours of sleep and counting. 

If I am lucky, I will get back to it momentarily without the added chore of visualizing and accounting for a long line of woolly farm animals leaping over fences.

Occasional bedtime coffee, I'd like you to meet my daily run of arbitrary distance …. let's see who wins this race.

On your marks.