The Burrow

I have to break my promise.  I can't do what I said I was going to do.  My goals must be reset.  I'm having a hard time with it all. 7 weeks ago, playing basketball with Mr. 11, I was coerced onto the basketball court.  It's hard to stay on the sidelines when the world's most adorable middle schooler is  importuning from the free throw line.   Please..... Please.... Oh, PLEASE.....  I couldn't resist him. Passing was fine, but then he wanted me to teach him to take a charge.  This involved swinging my butt into his belly.... and swinging my lower half is not something I've done a lot of in the past 5 years.  Needless to say, I swung, he took the charge and slid across the court, and my knee, swollen and achy, reminded me every day following that my bball days are long gone. I've rested.   I've iced. I've compressed.  I've elevated.   I took a week off from everything.  I've been very very very careful in the ...

That title resonates with women of my generation. Everyone knew someone who had one and was willing to share. The book introduced us to ourselves, with mirrors and contortions and sympathy and understanding. This was before full frontal nudity was a cable tv standard.  This was when  I Am Curious Yellow 's foreign film cachet combined with a flaccid phallus drew college students to campus movie theaters, only to leave long hours later, wondering why they'd spent the time. I was thinking about all this as I waited to ask my massage therapist a question.   "Where exactly does my psoas connect to the front of my hip?" I want to place my rubber therapy ball correctly when I'm doing my homework, and I couldn't be sure I was there. There  is up close and personal to parts you don't normally touch in public.   There  is why I switched to a female therapist.   There  is where she was moving my fingers so I could be sure I was feeling the right spo...

Mid-afternoon in the grocery store. Not Whole Foods or Sprouts or anyplace special, just my regular old grocery store on a sunny afternoon. There's no shade, so I park as close to the air conditioning as space allows. The local glossy magazine ran an article about the dangers of going outside when the temperatures are in triple digits. Hikers are dropping like foolish flies, taking off for 6 miles in the desert without water, bodies found by frantic rescue teams. I'm taking no chances. Feeling very self-righteous about taking care of my heart and not over-heating my blood, I cross the asphalt, sipping from my water bottle, admiring the blue skies with high white puffy clouds, watching the cars but not paying much attention to the people around me. I heard him before I saw him. A dark braid halfway down his back rested in a sweaty pool on his plaid shirt. His grey shorts came to the pad of his knee walker, his right knee and right hand connected him to his transportatio...

I am going to climb the Sears Tower. I know, I know, it isn't called Sears Tower anymore, but I worried that opening with the startling announcement that I was going to climb to the top of the Willis Tower would leave you flummoxed, wondering what it was, where it was, and why you should care.   There are 103 flights of stairs to the Sky Deck.  That's 2,109 steps. I just got a little teary, thinking of maneuvering myself from the couch to the front door, every one of those 5 steps an exercise in mind over matter, in will over strength, in desire over capability.   I found an appropriate 8 week training schedule on-line, after discarding those that included jogging and running up stadium steps. I can do so much more today than I could six months ago, and that can be said for the last five years of six month intervals.  Deep tissue massage combined with Pilates  got me here; strength training with weights in the gym combined with intervals on an inclined t...