On becoming an upright citizen

It’s weight training day, and Coach Iris has me doing lunges across the floor. I’m not graceful, and it’s not pretty. I look like a grocery cart with a balky wheel, but I am going forward. When I started this three months ago, I went over hard with every lunge. I was a sandwich board in a hurricane.

Strange thing, this balance business. It’s a mystery to me how I have managed to remain upright most of the time, because my balance has always been awful. I didn’t think it had to do with muscles, because I had me some of those. My legs have always been strong. Sometimes they’ve been spectacular, such as when I got off a 3,000-mile bicycle ride, or when Dave was regularly hauling me on twenty-mile urban walks, or when I was climbing mountains. There were many donut-and-beer-filled interludes, but all in all I should have had what it took to be a proper upright ape.

So I guess what has finally happened is Coach Iris has gotten the rest of my corpus signed up for the program. Yes, we do squats and bench presses and all that there, but there’s a bunch of accessory exercises to go with those that are aimed at improving the struts and buttresses. Evidently there’s this whole supporting cast of second-tier muscles that have been slacking off all this time, and she has made them snap to attention. Sure, I had decent quads and all. But the same couldn’t be said for the auxiliary crew, the lats, the abs, the what-have-you, that set up the stage for the star glutes. They were hanging around like non-union roadies who are being been paid in weed. Somehow the show went on, but it didn’t mean you should trust the rigging.

But with Coach Iris in charge now, body parts that never knew each other are starting to collaborate, and although I still marvel that I can now put my underpants on without lurching into a wall, that doesn’t even turn out to be the main thing. I feel different walking now.

Just walking down the street, I notice my shoulders are pulled back. My arms aren’t just dangling; there are force vectors other than gravity entering into the physics. I feel squared up, even though I’m round from almost any angle. My purchase on the planet feels more deliberate.

Up until now I’ve been as sturdy as custard on stilts. One stiff breeze, one wayward thought, and the load might shift. Now, all of a sudden, I feel like Godzilla laying claim to the ground at every step, pound pound pound, just pausing long enough to flick some Tokyo out of his foot creases.

I’ve got a ways to go. My lunges still have a humility wobble to them, but dang. Just try to knock me over now. (Oh, you totally still can. But it will take an extra few seconds. You’ll want to bring ice cream to make amends.)