The Gym

I was never a health club person.
For me, one of the joys of exercise is being outdoors. A good run through the park involves more than muscles and sweat, it includes seeing trees recently leafed out in spring, squirrels chasing one another in the woods, noticing whether the creek is up or down after rain or drought, maybe greeting a neighbor. Biking opens the experience even more, with miles of country road to explore, steep inclines to challenge those quads, and the whoosh of wind in my ears on speedy downhill rides. I also dance and practice yoga, and though they are done indoors they involve the mind and spirit in ways I wouldn’t expect in a gym. By comparison, running or pedaling in place seems manufactured.

But something has shifted. I have discovered The Gym.

In the category of “when a door closes, a window opens,” a shoulder injury limited my activity last winter, slamming the door shut on my customary dance class, yoga and running. The window opened when my sweetie invited me to try the pool at his gym – swimming being one activity that is safe for most injuries. After some hesitation (it’s not like stepping outdoors in running shoes and going – you have to fish around through summer gear to find swim goggles and a bathing suit, drive to the gym, figure out their Byzantine system of guests and free passes, etc.) I decided to give it a try.

I felt like an outsider visiting a foreign land. I walked through a maze of treadmills and elliptical machines, took a brief tour of weight-lifting contraptions and peeked into a room full of stationery bicycles for “spinning” classes, where apparently members pedal away while a teacher urges them on, changing the settings on the bicycles to simulate hills and flat areas. I found my way to the locker room and figured out the protocol of choosing a locker (any locker), then hoped my street clothes would still be there when I returned from the pool (I had no lock).

The pool is tiny, four lanes, but not at all crowded. We enjoyed a brief swim, maybe four laps in all, and lots of lolling around in the water. We raced once. My shoulder seemed all right, in fact it seemed to loosen up as I moved it and I felt relief from the constant pain I’d been experiencing. Then I sat in the “spa,” a giant hot tub with swirling jets and super hot water. That alone was worth the price of admission. Which, as it happens, was free, since I was a temporary guest.

And there were other things. Contrary to my preconceived notion that everyone in a gym would be in spandex wrapped over hyper-tight, super-defined muscles, this is a place where all shapes and sizes, all ages and races and socio-economic levels mix. Granted, most people are plugged into iPods while they run or pedal in place. But there is occasional friendly interaction in the pool, the spa, the locker room, and it’s sweet to see friends come to the gym together, chattering away as they get into workout gear. People seem to really be there for their health, they are doing something positive for themselves, and it feels good to be around that sort of effort.

I decided I’d go again. This time I swam longer. I felt I could stay for hours. My body, so starved for physical activity, was ecstatic, endorphins finally flowing again. I swam five lengths, then sat in the spa, then plunged into the cooler pool, invigorated, and swam five more. In the locker room, I helped one of the other members puzzle out her new combination lock, despite the fact that she spoke little English.

Since those first couple of visits, I’ve become a convert. I joined The Gym. This process was not so great – more like buying a car, with the staff throwing out specials and deals and instead of telling me what it costs each month, writing down the sum on a piece of paper as if it were a Great Secret, and sliding it across the desk for me to consider. Here’s the Secret: I wound up joining for a $25 initiation fee and $34.99 a month. More affordable than I would have imagined, pre-Gym Epiphany. Rates vary from gym to gym, of course – this is LA Fitness, in Silver Spring – and, as it turns out, from week to week, season to season, person to person etc.

But now that I’m a member, with a little card I can scan for entry into the sanctuary of good health, all that bargaining and car-dealing is behind me.

When I’m organized and have the time, I go to The Gym with a book to read while I work out on the elliptical machine (kinder on my still-healing shoulder than the treadmill). I don’t have to worry if it’s unseasonably cold, or raining, or dark. I don’t have to make it to The Gym in time for class, I can go whenever it suits me. I can sweat on the elliptical, then rinse off and go in the pool. I’ve worked up to 20 laps, sometimes more, not much by an athlete’s standards but enough to get my blood flowing. And then I get to sit in the spa, position my shoulder at the jets and breathe a loud sigh as I feel the tension flow out into the water.

The whole experience is like visiting a little oasis that is All About Me. I love the actual workout, feeling my heart rate increase, feeling my muscles stretch and come alive. I like to look at the inspirational photos of athletes on the walls, staring out of smooth, taut faces, challenging me to challenge myself. I love the order of the locker room – the efficient little lock I now use, the neat lines of wooden lockers, the convenience of hair driers, the option of a sauna or spa, the satisfaction when I remember all the accoutrements of post-workout routine (shampoo, lotion, hair product, clean underwear) and the efficiency of routine. Visiting the oasis is like a little gift to myself, all in the space of an hour or so.

My shoulder is feeling better. I think it's the swimming, and maybe the spa. Healing: just one of the many benefits of my newfound favorite thing.

Country Dog

Nala the city dog went country this weekend. For the first time she got to run beyond the confines of a small, fenced yard, and I got to walk her without a leash.

Sounds simple, and great, but from the front porch of our Takoma Park colonial, the prospect of Nala off leash was daunting. This is a dog who, when she slips the leash, gleefully runs away, moving like a souped up gazelle, all muscle and motion, joyfully speeding in and out of neighbors’ yards and scaring all of us with an abandon that shows her ignorance of moving vehicles. She has gotten into the middle of a six-lane highway and we felt lucky to have gotten her back. The country place we visit is far enough from any big roads to feel safe, but I couldn’t be sure that a taste of freedom might not tempt her to mindlessly run until she was exhausted, and then not be able to find her way back.

I didn’t give her enough credit.
Nala is nothing if not loyal, and she stuck pretty close to me in her initial hours here at Misty Mountain, a sweet little spot in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. By day two, she was comfortably mingling with new friends at a party on the deck, and I’m sure had no idea where I was.

Having dogs in the country is an entirely different enterprise than it is in the city. No one goes around picking up their poop, for example. They come along for the ride when it’s time to go to the grocery store, or the beer store, or to pick up seed at the farm supply place. They do not go in these places. They wait in the vehicle patiently – or not.

Country dogs don’t wear leashes, though they do have collars and tags. They are in and out of the house all day. They have their own lives.

Nala’s country life included:
Running free through acres of woods
Swimming in the pond
Riding to the general store
Chasing a wild turkey
Carrying a dead rabbit around in her mouth – killed, I am guessing, by the resident cat
Flopping, exhausted, at my feet.

And although I suspect she would have come by all this naturally, Nala has a compadre at Misty Mountain. Daisy, the resident dog, is a chocolate lab puppy and the first dog I’ve seen out-energize Nala. (That's her in the photo, before she met Nala.) She joyfully bounded around, showing Nala her favorite runs and leaping into the pond – while Nala watched from the shore.

Our city girl’s experience with water had been limited to tentatively dipping her paws into the very shallow Sligo Creek. Curious about not only Daisy’s swimming, but the humans splashing around, she put her paws in, then backed off. One of us gave her a push off the dock and she plopped in, surfaced and swam the short distance to shore, unconvinced she’d like to do it again.

Two days of running with Daisy and watching her plunge in and out of the pond, and that began to change. On Sunday, Nala ventured in a few inches, drank some of the water and backed out. Next time, she went in up to her chest. Finally, she swam into deep water – and, as if encouraging her new friend, Daisy got in, swimming so close their sides were touching. Then the two of them got out, shook off, and ran.

Country dogs.

Coloring Book

We love color in our kitchen. Nothing beats vibrant red and yellow peppers on various shades of mixed green lettuces, done up in a sea-blue bowl with a sheen of olive oil to set it off. And did you know that the red peppers have twice as much vitamin C as the green ones, nine times the carotene plus the cancer-fighting phytochemical lycopene? True fact: I learned it from the American Institute for Cancer Research, home of all things healthy and cancer-preventive.

Experts often tout color as an indication of a healthy diet – the more color, the healthier the plate. Now Michael Pollan, our household’s hero du jour, has added his voice to the chorus. In his latest book, he suggests, “Eat your colors.”

I bought this book, Food Rules, on impulse, thinking I’d read it and then leave it out for the kids and their friends to pick up when they’re sitting around the living room, hanging out (sneaky way to turn them on to good health, I know). Formatted in micro chapters, it is an easily digestible, entertaining list of do’s and don’ts: what to eat, what to avoid, and a bit about why. I imagine it’s a condensed version of Pollan’s other books (In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I have not yet read -- I am admittedly nonfiction-averse, someone who starts a non-fiction book with enthusiasm, gets distracted two chapters in and returns to the world of make believe. Food Rules is so short, though, I got through it just fine).

Food Rules includes such witticisms as “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk” and “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.” Some of my favorites include “Eat meals” (as opposed to endless stand-up snacking); “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”; and “Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.” I also like, “Have a glass of wine with dinner.”

The kids haven’t had a chance to pick the book up in the living room – yet – but Clara wound up choosing it as the nonfiction assignment in English class. She read it with a friend, and now the two of them are experimenting with new habits – chewing your food until it’s liquid, for example, and crowding an omelet with veggies.

Not that I’m surprised -- many of the teens I’ve met care about what they eat and are various shades of vegetarian, have sensitivities to dairy or wheat, recognize the value of organic and would like to buy from local farmers (it helps that some of them have worked for the farmers at our nearby farmer’s market, selling produce on Sundays). Now that the Pollan book has made it into their consciousness, I am pleased not only for them, but for myself: They are reinforcing my belief in some of what he has to say. Clara even made her own rule, which she illustrated with fresh carrots and homemade pesto noodles on an orange colored plate: “Never eat food that is the same color as your plate, unless your plate is orange or green.” Makes for a beautiful meal.

Carpe Diem, Carpe Musica

Okay I’ll admit it. I haven’t sung with a choir since I was in high school, and that was a very long time ago. But here, in this spacious rehearsal room at Strathmore, a center for the arts, I get to do it again – carefully pick out my part in the sheet music, then blend my voice with the sopranos on either side of me. I love that leaning-in moment when two singers are listening to one other, and I love that surround-sound feeling of many voices – nearly 100 in this case – striking full-on harmony.

It is the third rehearsal of Carpe Diem, the ad hoc chorus I wrote about here. The music is lovely – Malcolm Dalglish’s Song of the Earth, with fluid, undulating harmonies and rippling rhythms evocative of flowing rivers and breezes blown through leafy trees. It will be sung, appropriately enough, for Earth Day.

But I think I’m enjoying the comradery of singing just as much as the music itself. Just as it did in high school, the music transcends the other things that define us as individuals. In school, chorus was the one time I stepped out of tracked honors classes like chemistry and English, and into a more diverse group of kids, where we thought about voices, not grades. In this adult chorus -- with a few teens sprinkled in – singers are more interested in musical experience and tone than who’s working what job and for how much salary.

Still, I do know that the woman next to me teaches young primary schoolers music – I asked if she sang professionally, as her strong voice was nailing that high A pretty well, and she admitted her job did keep her tuned in, so to speak. On my other side is a woman I know from my neighborhood, a minister mom I run into occasionally at yoga class. Last rehearsal I met a professional story teller. My carpool buddies include a psychotherapist, and I know there’s at least one doctor in the mix, plus a midwife, a land conservationist and a landscaper.

Here, though, we categorize ourselves not by profession but by voice: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. And then by height, so the director can hear each of us, and we can each see her. That feels like another throwback to school days – tall, lanky folks in the back, so they inevitably feel gawky and awkward; short ones up front, where they can feel stumpy and small. You would think we’d have grown past all that as adults but I can see by the way people shuffle themselves around that we’re not quite over it. No matter. The music does transcend – body image¸ age, profession, all of it.

I’m looking forward to the next rehearsal – last time, our director admonished us that we must do our homework, and I’ve been dutifully sitting at the piano, practicing. And here’s an improvement over high school days: I can listen to a CD of the music and sing along or I can use an MP3 player or my computer to hear an explanation of dynamics from the composer, Malcolm Dalglish. Yes, a few things have changed – but the inspiration of the music remains.

Carpe Diem will be performing April 23 – for more info see the web site.
(Image from Oolitic Music)

The Chopins: Bringing Music and Literature Together

This week my daughter, Clara, came home from school and announced she likes Chopin. Both Kate Chopin, whose book, The Awakening, she is reading for high school English, and Frederic Chopin, the 19th century composer. Clara’s fabulous English teacher (thanks, Mr. Anderson!) had the students listen to Chopin, to see if the piece referenced in the book matches the mood of the story. Talk about value added. I love this class.

So as Clara played Chopin through Pandora (do you know about this? Tell the web site what music you like and it will play it, plus music like it, for hours), I recalled how I once played Chopin on the piano, myself. I don’t play much anymore, but, inspired, I took out the old music books.

Playing a piano is a little like riding a bike – once you’ve done it, it comes back quickly. But if you’ve been away for long, there’s a whole lot more wobbling, and if you could fall down on a piano, there would be a lot of pileups and scraped knuckles on the keyboard. The muscle memory in my fingers allows me to run pretty accurately over grace notes and trills and magically land (some of) the right chords, but precision and consistency are long gone. And if I start to actually think about the individual notes, they leave me stumbling.

Still, going through my old piano books and trying some of these pieces was a little like going through an old photo album. Things are familiar in an “oh, yeah, I remember this!” way. I was amazed at how much I could play – and so very grateful to my parents for giving me lessons (and enforcing practice time) for so many years.

These occasional forays into reviving my piano playing always bring to mind the salons of the 19th century, when instead of turning on the television, people would play music for one another in the parlor. I get the feeling that most people (of a certain stature) learned music of some sort. And I often wind up thinking about how much more beautiful our world would be, if we chucked the t.v. and instead played music and read novels and poetry to one another each evening (a little needlework, anyone?)

On our Chopin night, Clara wound up turning off Pandora and I played for her (and, admittedly, myself) while she did her homework. Turns out that in addition to Chopin, she likes Mozart, too. Later, she dug up “Bastien Piano Basics, Primer Level,” and reviewed what she’d learned at around age 11, when I (briefly) sat her down on the piano bench and gave her lessons. And yesterday, she came home from school and made a beeline for the piano to play some more. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to sit in my office and hear I’m a Little Teapot, Skip to My Lou and Scarborough Fair drifting up the stairs.

First blossoms, all over again

It has been a long winter. The longest in memory for me and my Maryland neighbors – but perhaps that’s just the way it feels in the wake of weeks of snow and ice, followed by an uplifting but too-brief peak of sun, then bone-chilling dampness and rain for days. Cold, again? Yes. So the garden gloves go back on the shelf and we pull on our sweaters and wait it out.

And, in this grey landscape, we cherish the bright spots: like the first daffodils! I saw them just days ago. They were still tight in their buds, but like a lesson learned over and over again, I knew they would emerge, and today, here they are, open to the first sun we've had in a what seems like a very long time. Spring, I think, is the very origin of faith.

Other signs whisper of warmth and color to come: patches of purple crocuses (does anyone ever plant these, or do they just come up on their own every year?), an early spray of yellow forsythia down the block, a sprinkling of snow drops in my own front yard.

Last week (in that brief sunny period) I watched as my neighbor crouched in his curbside garden with his two young daughters (ages 2 and 4), showing them how to draw a line in the soil and sprinkle lettuce seeds in a (relatively) straight line, then gently cover them up. When the tender leaves emerge, and the girls taste what they’ve planted, it will be an epiphany – look at what we did! Even though I have sprinkled lettuce seeds year after year in my own garden, when the babies appear like green fuzz on the soil, it still seems like a miracle. And it is.

The twist to this lesson in faith: Planting a garden only underscores the promise of spring. The earth will come around, whether we believe in it or not.

Play It Again

Yesterday I slid a CD into the player and selected my favorite track and just as it began to play, was filled up with missing my son, it was like he’d gotten in the car after a long time away and we were both grinning over the opening riff of a Dave Matthews song, and then that piercing vocal interval, and the lyric, “I’d like to show you what’s inside, but I sure don’t care if you do or you don’t like it.”

What do I miss about Tyler, as he travels the world? I could tell you I miss his creativity, his fearlessness and disregard for convention. But words don’t quite get at the way we miss our loved ones. Thank God, then, for music.

There’s another tune running around in my head that brings me back to when the children were slippery fish in the bath tub, and I was a young mama singing to them: “You’re my little potato... my sweet potato, dug you up, you come from underground.” I thought it was just a quirky tune from a children’s cassette but now I realize that (of course) someone wrote it and arranged it and, imagine this, will be performing it April 23 at the grand Music Hall at Strathmore. And – surprise! -- I’ll be singing it there, too.

As a member of Carpe Diem, an ad hoc chorus pulled together to perform at specific events, I’ll be singing with Malcolm Dalglish, the very man who wrote “Little Potato” – and a plethora of other songs for dulcimer, drums and voice. The event celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, so while I may have visions of bathtime, most of the music will evoke the rhythms and beauty of the natural world – another grand subject difficult to capture with just words.

The potato song goes on -- “The world is big, so big, so very big – it’s new to you, it’s new to you.” Its bounce and upbeat melody convey the simple joy of discovery – or rediscovery, the privilege of parents everywhere who see the world anew when they look through the eyes of their children. Happy travels, Tyler. Happy Earth Day, all.