Immortality comes with aches and pains

When I was a boy I was immortal.  I knew that I was bigger, stronger, and faster than most.  I had fought with the best of them (my brothers Barry and Jeff).  I lost a few more than I won, but not that many and after-all there were two of them and only one of me. 

I knew that I could move a mountain, build a bridge, or accomplish anything that I set my mind too.  I know my brothers felt the same.

Since then, days, weeks, months, and years have flown from my future into my past.  And I at first grew to understand that while not immortal, I was at the least charmed and relatively undiminished by the passing years.  In fact, I grew stronger and more capable if anything as time ticked in my ear.
My physical “prime” was a bit delayed as I launched myself off a roof top around 21 and tore up a few muscles and crushed some bones.  And so, though I looked my fittest and strongest in my early 20s, I was in my late 30’s before I hit full peak strength.

In the early morning of our summertime break from school, my brothers and I would get up, run our paper route, returning home about when Mom and Dad headed off to work to find Dad’s list of our chores for the day.  Once we reviewed that, we could figure out how much time we had to goof off and still get the chores done.

Being health young males, the first thing we did after assessing the chore list was….immediately begin procrastinating.

Yep, in the time honored tradition of nearly every male to ever set foot on this planet, we believed in never doing anything now that could be put off and done later.

So we would cobble up some breakfast, sit down and watch TV.  TV then and TV now are two very different animals; and not just because one had all the colors of a Zebra while the other has all the colors of two overlapping rainbows.

TV was black and white, in our case for several years after color was the rage.  TV consisted of three broadcasters, ABC, CBS, and NBC.  Selection was minimal. And since we found no interest in New York lifestyle issues, we pretty much had only one real choice; The Jack Lalaine Show.

Jack’s parents were a French couple who had moved to San Francisco where Jack was born.  He was a short  man, and in his youth, he worked out a great deal. Enough that he looked like a triangle balanced on its point.  Enough to win a number of competitions including Mr Universe.  If the man had any fat on him, it was artfully disguised as muscle.

He didn’t have a six-pack.  Oh, it was there alright, but you couldn’t see it for the rest of the abdominal muscle stacked on top of each other.  He was none too tall, in fact probably shorter than 5’-6”. 

But he was so ripped that he made Arnold Swartzenegger look spindly.

We used to laugh at Jack on his exercise show.  We were old enough to have PE at school by then. 
We knew what exercise looked like, smelt like, and felt like.  And Jack, he was simply sitting in chairs and lifting his legs, or standing up and whirling his arms around, or leaning over and tying his shoes.

Yep, we would sit in front of the TV laughing as our cereal milk periodically spewed and dribbled out of our noses.  Next to the Three Stooges, or Laurel and Hardy, it was the funniest thing on TV.

And in my late teens I was a pretty decent shot with a rifle (see “Things that go Bang – Part IV).   Good enough that I could take three shots with standard iron sights at 300 yards with my 1907 Mauser and the three holes on paper could be covered with a 50 cent piece.

Back then my brothers and I used to snicker and laugh at the old men out at the range struggling to get a group even after wasting their money on big scopes mounted to their rifles.

In my late teens I could work the morning long hooking and tossing 150 lb straw bales onto flatbed trucks. 

In my late thirties I could grab a 950-1050 pound 55 gallon drum, pull it up on just the near side rim and roll it across concrete for a hundred yards or more. 

At 40 I hoisted a 124 lb backpack onto my shoulders and set off for a 6 miles hike at 9,000 feet.

At 45 I could lay hands on a 5’ long 24” diameter fresh sawn redwood log section, roll it up to my thighs and then lift it onto a shoulder and carry it across rough ground to throw in the back of a truck.

Suffice it to say that I never met anything I couldn’t move, including some 185 cubic yards of mountain behind my house.  Figure total weight moved with shovel and wheelbarrow at right around 500,000 pounds while reshaping that hillside.

But as I said earlier; days, weeks, months, and years have flown from my future into my past.  And while I am still standing here, I am not the same me that I once was.  Since the days of my youth I have learned that like any other living thing, I will have phases and will grow, peak, weaken, and then die.  I suppose every individual has to learn this for themselves.

But in learning it, I realized I owe a few apologies.

Jack, wherever you are pumping iron at weights I will never know, I am sorry I laughed at you.  Six months ago I couldn’t have used my left arm in a Nazi salute if Hitler and his henchmen had been standing in front of me with their Lugars out and cocked.  Yep, standing in the middle of a room and swinging your arms in windmills does the body an amazing amount of good.  As does sitting down in a chair, standing up and walking around it, only to sit down again.  The man was decades ahead of his time.  And while he seemed old to us back then, I have worked it out and he was only in his late 40’s.  But he understood how older folk needed to move - to be able to move.  And God love the man, I dug up several of his old routines from the internet and use them daily.  I even have hopes of being able to bend over and tie my shoes again someday.

And those old-timers out at the Livermore Rod and Gun club.  I know now that I was just an idiot snot nose kid.  Cause now on the high side of 60, while I can still place three shots close enough to cover by a 50 cent piece, it is only through the miracle of modern optics, and the luck of a still reasonably healthy nerve system.  Because without the optics, heck, I can’t even see a paper target at 100 yards, much less 300 yards.  And I know a large percentage of folks my age that couldn’t hold their hand, much less arm, steady to stay out of the fires of hades.  Thus are the ravages of time on the body’s various systems.

And just this last Christmas, I wanted to take a roll of canvas fabric down to a nephew.  So I called up the younger cross street neighbor to help me load that 190 pound roll in the RV…and I let my son and nephew unload the dang thing.

So while my joints and sight, and muscles may be fading, I can at least console myself with the fact that my brain is thinking clearer, if not quite so fast.

© 2018, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved