To an Athlete Dying Young

I remember that day so vividly,  it’s hard to believe it was over 60 years ago.

In the fall of 1963 I was in my senior year at NYU Heights.  (See Ghostwriting in the Family, The Fortune Cookie Candidate  and Theatre Dreams)

I was a member of the college theatre group,  and half-past noon on Friday,  November 22 we were in the midst of rehearsing a play when someone came running towards the stage crying out that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.   We stopped the rehearsal of course, and amidst our shock, rage, and tears, we disbursed.   Some students rushed to their dorms to call family,  some sought friends or sweethearts on campus,  and commuter students like me headed home.   Whatever classes any of us had later that day were either cancelled or we cut.

I regularly commuted by bus between the Heights’ west Bronx campus and my parents’  house in the east Bronx,  and I clearly remember my bus trip home that day.   Rather than full of the usual passenger chatter,  the bus was eerily silent,  as were the city streets we drove through –  the same unsettling feeling that pervaded New York decades later on September 11.

There were no cell phones then of course and no one on the bus had a transistor radio that day – and we were all desperate to know what was happening in Dallas.  Then, as another bus approached from the opposite direction, our driver slowed down and opened his window.   The other driver did the same and leaned over to share the awful news that the bullet had been fatal.

When I got home my parents had the television on and,  like the rest of the nation,  we watched TV coverage of the assassination over that weekend and for many days to come.

On Monday I went back to campus.  Only three days had passed,  but walking across the college green to the auditorium where the dean was to speak,  I felt I had aged.

After the dean addressed us,  the professor who taught my Chaucer course took the podium.   That semester in class we’d been reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English,  but on that somber day our professor read the famous elegy by the 19th century poet A E Houseman,  To an Athlete Dying Young.

The time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the market -place;

Man and boy stood cheering by / And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today,  the road all runners come, / Shoulder-high we bring you home, 

And set you on your threshold down,  / Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad,  to slip betimes away,  /  From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows /  It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes that shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers / After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.

So before the echoes fade,  /  The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up / The still defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head / Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls / The garland briefer than a girl’s.

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

Maybe male chauvinism had forced Lily and Carmelita to become the better monopolists.
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Does everyone want to lose weight in the new year? My resolution began after seeing photos of myself from our first trip to Italy in 2011. I had never been so heavy. I looked puffy and not like myself. I didn’t want to turn 60 on December 10, 2012 looking like that. I had never been overweight and was aggravated with myself. I decided that I would (for the first time ever) work with a trainer at our gym on the Vineyard beginning in June of 2012 and I did. She set down a workout program for me, as well as discussing my diet and eating habits.

I was very disciplined. Not only did I go to the gym five days a week (two of those days I took my regular Pilates class. The other days, I did the routine that Griffin set down; a half hour of aerobics work, then working on machines for strength and toning. I also gave up bread, other sorts of carbs, desserts and watched other sugar intake. The pounds came off. By my 60th birthday I saw a big improvement. I had lost about 14 pounds (in all, over the year, I would lose about 18 pounds).

I was pleased with the shape I was in. But it demanded constant discipline. I was good about the eating for years. I delighted in my gym routine until I became injured. Some of the classes were intense, perhaps not meant for a 60 year old body (and taught by a 30-something instructor). In 2017, I wound up with tendinitis and a sprain of my left hip flexor, a sprain in my groin and bulging discs in my lower back resulting in sciatica down my left leg. I got great physical therapy, but it kept me out of the gym for some time. I even had a series of spinal injections to calm the bulging discs.

I also had increasing arthritis in my right toes and had several toe surgeries over the past seven years. The foot is now rather unstable. All this means time away from the gym and the less I exercise, the more I eat (counter-intuitive, I know, but there you are). The 2020 election spectacle also sent my M&M habit into overdrive. I can’t even keep them in the house any longer.

Here are before and after photos, from 2011 and 2016, taken at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, to illustrate the point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You take my point. I don’t want to go back. I was OK during the lockdown. I’ve written about exercising at home during lockdown, first on my own, then finding my beloved Josie and PJ on Zoom and keeping up with them, which was terrific.

 

But eating as strictly as I did for years became difficult to maintain. The pounds crept back on. With all the injuries, I couldn’t work quite as hard as before and, to be fair, there is nothing like a live class class for motivation, much as I enjoyed the Zoom classes (and even streaming some at convenient times). I looked forward to getting back to my home gym in Oct, 2021.

However, this happened in late June, 2021:

My weight and fitness were already shot, as far as I was concerned. Now I had sprained my ankle (or so I thought) and was really hobbled. I found my old air cast (I’ve sprained it twice before) and went to Pilates class with the air cast on. But it didn’t heal. Being on the Vineyard limits doctor availability (not to mention that I was tending to Dan after his terrible accident, 6 days after mine). I finally saw a doctor in mid-September who did an X-ray, said there was nothing broken, I could go back to my gym when I came home in Oct, just don’t do Barre class.

I wore a compression sleeve, was SO happy to take a rigorous class a few days a week, but my eating still wasn’t good (too many sweets). Dan said he had never seen me so excited as I was when I signed up for my first Pilates fusion class on October 4 with Melissa, with whom I normally take Barre. She’s a great teacher. I did get a great, tough workout (the fusion part means there is weight work and standing work, as well as some mat Pilates work). But the joy was short-lived.

I finally got an MRI on Oct 13 and a broken bone at the crux of my ankle and foot was revealed. I started PT on Oct 25. He told me to stay off the foot as much as possible. So all exercise except for mat Pilates (which is mostly on my back) is out of the question.

A week before Thanksgiving, I rolled the ankle again. That put me in a bigger brace all the time. My weight is stable, but not going down. I can’t wait until the time when I can exercise again, as I’d like to, when I am pain free and can really get back to the gym. I am 11 pounds up from where I was in 2012. I would settle for losing 5 pounds at this point. I know I need to do better with the eating again and have started, but exercise is the key.

Back to the gym…

Spinning for Hanukkah Gelt

You probably don’t have to be Jewish to know about the Hanukkah game called Dreidel.

It’s a betting game where each player antes up and then, depending on the spin of the dreidel  –  the four-sided spinning top that serves as the dice –  he either takes nothing from the pot if the dreidel stops spinning on NUN,   takes half the pot on HEY,   or all of the pot on GIMMEL the big pay-off.  However a player who throws SHIN must add to the pot.

And In most Hanukkah-celebrating homes the “chips” are actually chocolate coins wrapped in foil –  gold foil for milk chocolate and silver foil for dark chocolate – and each player piles up their loot like gamblers do at more serious gaming tables.

In the Hanukkah song  I Have a Little Dreidel the spinning top is made of clay,  as dreidels may have been homemade by kids centuries ago.  But today at holiday time plastic dreidels in all sizes can be bought most anywhere,  although the nicer ones are made of wood.   I admit I’m a sucker for the latter and have a small collection!

Years ago we sent our very young son to a summer day camp where they were obviously teaching the kids Native American lore.  One day he came home to tell us he had learned the Indian word for “money”.

“Ah yes.”. I said,  “I think I know it too  – is it WAMPUM?” 

The kid looked puzzled.  “No,” he said,  “it’s GELT!”

(“Gelt“ you may know is Yiddish for money – I get the feeling that camp director was Jewish.)

Happy Hanukkah! 

– Dana Susan Lehrman