The Sloth From the Black Lagoon
I am back to my peaceful existence today on the hilltop. After a sleepless night spent grading and writing, I got some Z’s this morning before going to the “Perfect Workout” with Kim. She loves to say, as she did to the gym of four people this morning, that she can do anything for 20 minutes. That gives me the comedic opportunity to say back to the gym (while I am straining under the weight of some high intensity Nautilus equipment) that there are a LOT of things I cannot do for 20 minutes. But I get through my 20 minutes with some incremental improvement in duration or weight level relayed to me by my dime-store version of Harry Connick Jr., who is my trainer, John. John has that Bayou, pseudo-Black drawl that makes you think he may be putting it all on just to be cool. After the perfect 20 minutes spent on 7-8 nautilus machines doing the slow grind, we drive home and I start looking around for something to do until my massage (this is the life, right?). A little garden watering and checking out the succulents and I have determined that the normal seasonal rain (it rained hard here for two days while we were gone and while the rest of the country was gearing up for that nasty snowstorm that is sweeping across the country), has left everything not just sufficiently watered, but on the verge of being over-watered.
The weird thing about succulents, which store lots of water in their stems and leaves, is that they tolerate draught quite well to a point (I’ve seen that point and it can either force dormancy or even tactical partial shut-down of some of the plant), but they tend not to do so well with too much water. They visibly rot out. You can actually see that succulents will shrink up without sufficient water and wait for a better day, but if they get over-watered they just go bad and then sometimes don’t have the ability to recover because rot leads to bugs and pests and then its game over. San Diego is called a Mediterranean or temperate climate like you get along the northern coast of the Mediterranean and the western parts of Spain and Portugal. Western Turkey, Chile and Australia have some of the same weather characteristics, but the West Coast probably has the most outside of the Iberian Peninsula. It’s very much the perfect climate for succulents and they abound in this area. My nephews wife, Natalie, who is quite the succulent maven, always says to me that succulents need to be ignored to thrive. I want to believe her, but I just can’t. When I ignore them they look good for a while, but then, eventually, some of them look like they need attention and out here attention tends to translate into more water. For all that draught-tolerant headline news about succulents, here we are in December and as I look out to my front succulent garden, the mainstay and biggest portion of our succulent array, they currently look fabulous and verdant. There are a few that are looking over-ripe, but not many.
That all means to me personally that there is very little for me to do in the garden right now. Everything is doing great all by itself. I have Joventino coming for the last visit of the year next Wednesday and I will come up with some projects to keep him busy, but otherwise I have at most a bit of pruning and touching-up. Two years ago I had the hell of a deck replacement to keep me busy. Last year I had the Hobbit House to build and that is looking great and is as done as it can be. I am asked all the time, today included by my massage therapist, as to what’s next in the garden, and I don’t really know what to say. Let’s see if I’ve given you the right picture. I am lying on the massage table in my bedroom with the floor-to-ceiling window out to the back hillside looking out over the work I have done to make that hillside special for me, for our visitors and for my grandkids. I need that weekly two-hour massage more than you may realize.
I understand that there is a wide spread between what is wanted and what is needed, but I stand by my view that I need my massage. It is true that we all make choices throughout our lives that set the course of those lives. The trick is to understand that we must all live with the consequences of our decisions. I think about my mother. She made a decision in 1946 to move to Venezuela to work for the Rockefeller Foundation. She had no idea at the time about what that decision would bring about for her. She didn’t know she would spend a dozen years in Venezuela. She didn’t know she would meet her husband and bear three children while living there. And needless to say, she did not know what those decisions would lead to with their own butterfly or domino effect. It is fair to say that like decisions that we all make at critical junctures in our lives, that decision in 1946 changed the world and she, as well as many other people, simply had to live with those consequences, over and over again. I have made my own decisions in life and I too must live with those consequences.
The biggest decision I have ever made (and I know there is a deeply imbedded pun in this statement) is to allow myself to remain big throughout my life. I could pretend that I had no choice in the matter, but that is simply not true. I had no endocrine imbalance that made my size inevitable. I simply had other priorities that took precedence over whatever effort was needed to be a smaller, more normally-sized individual. Some of it was a lack of discipline, to be sure. But it was much more than that as well. I have never been stupid about the costs of my size or the tradeoffs I was making. In fact, I could convincingly argue that the costs and tradeoffs ended up being far less than I ever imagined, which means that my choices were particularly good ones. We all go through life giving things up knowingly to follow whatever paths we choose. We engage in thrill sports knowing that our odds of survival have somehow been reduced, even if only at the margin. We venture out of our homes and across streets, knowing the statistics on unintended accidents and that the slip and fall of life can intercede at any moment. I don’t run for buses, as they say, or skip down stairs, for that matter, because I don’t want to hurt myself for lack of a small bit of caution, knowing that at my age, recuperation from such an injury can be long or even unattainable. That is a choice.
But underlying my whole existence is the fact that I will be too big for my own good for as long as I live. I have lost weight since I moved out here in retirement, but that trend may or may not continue. I do not have a plan to drop enough weight to get to a place where I fit neatly onto an insurance industry BMI table. But by the same token, I do not plan to sit back and go quietly into that dark night as Dylan Thomas said. I plan to stay as active in the ways that matter to me as I can, and to do that, I need to protect the viability of my legs and joints. It is amazing that at my size and age that I have had no surgical interventions on my knees, ankles, hips, shoulders, back or any other important point of bodily inflection. That doesn’t mean I don’t have some damage to those connective tissues, but none of it seems to be bad enough or painful enough to cause a need for any serious prophylactic. But what keeps me going and enables me to sleep at all at night is that I get a deep-tissue massage once a week. Given my body mass and my level of discomfort (significant, but not critical), two hours is the time it takes to unkink my kinks, mostly in my legs and hips. None of this is optional. I have made my decisions, I am living with the consequences and I NEED to keep my body limber with the help of a weekly two-hour deep-tissue massage.
Just at this moment, Betty walks by, looking like a long-legged white sloth. It is a look she just has. She didn’t choose it, nature chose it. I sit here thinking about sloths and realize that to some, I too am a sloth. I certainly move at sloth-like speed at times. But like Betty, Nature has made me who and what I am and I am OK with it all. I like the thought that I am the Sloth from the Black Lagoon and that I will do what I have to do to keep doing it.