A pinch is all it takes

The pain seemed to tap me on the shoulder only lightly before it tiptoed over to my neck and tried to seize it.

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Maybe I slept wrong. Or turned too quickly. Maybe my body finally needs the mythical eight glasses of water a day to keep all the toxins moving out and my muscles from drying up and turning to jerky.

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At first, it felt like nothing more than a little pinch. It lasted for only a few seconds before it shifted sideways and then disappeared.

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I wasn’t alarmed, but I was trying to find ways to adjust that didn’t really help.

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Day by day, it got incrementally worse. By week’s end, I could concentrate on little else besides a single point, midway along the trapezius, where the pain had settled and sharpened as I stared into the computer screen for the forty-fifth hour. I could chase it: The pain would ebb as I leaned forward, and flow as I shifted my head back and sideways. But I couldn’t really contain it.

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The Google Machine mocks my investigation. It scoffs at my thrice-weekly running argument and suggests that what I am experiencing is a flare-up between my ol’ friends, tension and stress, who had perched precariously atop the unmistakable evidence of an otherwise sedentary lifestyle.

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I’ve gone through enough physical therapy with my children to know that the aches and pains of childhood aren’t always the “growing” kind. Often, they are the slouching kind, the sitting-too-long kind, or the dreaded head-hung-low-because-it’s angled-down-at-your-phone-too-long kind of discomfort, which feels like it may be here to stay since there is no way we can counteract the shapes our reliance on modern conveniences twists us into.

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I tried everything: I tried to avoid looking down; I tried alternating heat and ice; I tried stretching and moving at a snail’s pace. I tried sleeping with a new pillow, and then no pillow, then positioning all the pillows in the house so that my shoulders arched backward.

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I even tried forcing myself to relax … breathing in and out with slow, measured breaths, then willing my jaw to unclench and my shoulders to lower away from my ears.

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Tricking myself into thinking that the combination had worked, and the pinch had smoothed itself out. I could walk and run. I could  even carry heavy things while walking and running without much discomfort.

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But the second I sat down, the pain climbed up my back as if it had been formally invited to play a game of chicken.

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And that’s where I was, sitting at a picnic table, swapping stories of hardship with my perennially injured Saturday Run Club friends, when one of these intrepid athletes shared a sip of wisdom from her golden chalice.

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“When you go home, lie down on your bed, gently lean back so your head is hanging off the edge, then ever-so-carefully lift your head and chest slightly as if you were attempting a sit-up. Just a few reps. Don’t overdo.”

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I wasted no time. When I got home, I lay down on a chaise lounge and scooted to the edge until my head dipped backward. I let it hang for a minute before I gingerly lifted it up. I repeated the process three more times, letting a few hours pass before I performed another set.

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I wasted even less time texting my friend, as the advice seemed to be working.

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It wasn’t magic, but it felt miraculous. A few minutes a day was enough to keep the pinch at bay.

Communing with Community

I woke up before the alarm.

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The numbers - 5:58 - came into focus as my eyelids reluctantly parted.

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No time for the snooze bar.

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I had more than one job on this Saturday morning – Race Day, as our run club directors had referred to it since January, when the planning began in earnest – and each of them would require a degree of precision timing and the strength of muscle groups my body is not used to exerting.

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This was going to be a big one: There would be a record number of participants and spectators, but also a handful of changes that would throw a new learning curve toward even the most veteran of our volunteers.

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I would fold T-Shirts and unfold boxes. I would make pickups and deliveries of various things.

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I would schlep water and fetch bagels. I would deliver cups, plastic cutlery, bananas, granola bars, and recycling containers. I would take thousands of pictures at two different start lines and follow these subjects to the awards ceremony, the camera seeming heavier than I had remembered.  

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Next, I would help with clean-up, hauling the recycling and a half-dozen bags of trash off the premises.

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But I was one of many people working together to ensure the community road race was as successful as possible: Parking, Registration, Refreshments, Kids Race, Announcing, Waterstop, Vendor Village, Finish Line, Course Marshals, Outriders, Traffic Safety, Medical Services.

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I smile and socialize with people who pitch in to help. We laugh as we struggle through the momentary hardship, bringing our mantra back to the joys. When the task is completed, we all peel off in different directions, scouting for the next thing that needs doing.

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For the most part, the day is going as planned. The sun is shining, and the temperature is pleasant. Things are by no means problem-free, but the snags are getting sorted. I hardly notice the time.

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Eventually, we look up from our work to find nothing left to be done.

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I marvel at the difference. An hour earlier, the place was teeming. Every inch of space was saturated in the ephemera of the event: the bright colors of running kits, and table upon table of free treats and swag. Now it looked like we hadn’t been here at all. The grass was lush and green; not a blade seemed trampled.

I am entirely spent. My muscles will ache tomorrow, but I don’t want to move. I love this moment. I want to collect all the moments of the day I might have glossed over: the kids whose eyes lit up when they picked up the first race bibs of their careers; the hugs at the finish line, and the high fives. I notice the newcomers now, and the regulars. I wonder about those who are absent. I hope they are doing well.

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Eventually, a few of us stragglers will meander down to the local watering hole to swap stories and celebrate.

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There is always time to dwell on the difficulties, but this feels rare and important: a time to revel in each other and feel like part of something bigger. 

Zen and the art of household maintenance

 The weekend arrives with a schedule of household tasks that never ceases. There is laundry, and cleaning, and tidying, and the procuring of groceries. Depending on the season, there could be shoveling the walk or mowing the lawn. A thousand tasks randomly volunteer and all of them combined amount to the bare minimum of life’s essential needs.

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And as much as these tasks seem mindless, I tend to think about them all the time.

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Or half the time, since I often get distracted midway through by the intersection of other chores.

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The drier door ajar; a broom left out near a pile of nature’s glitter tracked in on the shoes, left catawampus in the foyer; dishes, all clean and in analogous piles on the counter, are waiting to be lifted into their dwelling places in the cabinets above. The grass has grown gangly around the edges.

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Our halfway house. Everything is halfway finished.

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Not just in tasks, but in its structure as well.

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As I carry a basket of laundry into the bedroom, I catch sight of ancient blue painter’s tape curling from the edge of window trim as if for the first time …  and not every morning since we moved here sixteen years ago.

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One of these days, I tell myself, I will peel that off. Then I just half smile, knowing that this is a conversation I’ve had with myself before. I, of course, bargain in response that as soon as the tape is dislodged, the wall will need to be repainted and the moulding retaped.

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I like the smell of the things I am folding, fresh from the dryer and still warm. It signals emphatically that they are clean. I had selected the hamper over another, one I had washed and dried days ago, because I didn’t want to face all the wrinkles that would have unfurled.

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Those duds would need another ride through the tumble, this time under the fancy “steam setting” I rarely remember is an option. Or not. The menfolk, whose clothes I am laundering, are perfectly capable of using an iron if they should be bothered by the idea of walking around in the world looking like an unmade bed.

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When I go back for the next load, I notice the perfect footprints of a size-13 shoe on the still-drying floorboards. The map they make starts in the entryway and leads through the right side of the dining room into the kitchen, where they turn in front of the refrigerator and traipse back through the house on the left side.

For some reason that evades me, I do not become irate.  Perhaps the tracks reminded me of a different kind of sadness, the kind of footprints the dog stopped making last summer when she left us. I could dwell in that sadness forever, but I won’t. The mop is still standing in a full bucket, waiting for me to wring it out, douse the weeds with our work product, and call it a day.