I’VE EXERCISED AND I CAN’T GET UP [T, 4-21-20]

Christ In Winter-Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I’VE EXERCISED AND I CAN’T GET UP     [T, 4-21-20]

Who would have guessed that 83 years of slouching would cause lower back pain? Well, only a little pain. Mostly stiffness. But enough of a problem I can’t reach over fast enough to snatch a cookie off the rug while the floor germs are still observing the five second rule. Now, that is a problem.

So I have been doing all the exercises my doctor and the internet have prescribed. Some of them, I have to lie on the floor. You know, the partial situps and the partial pushups, which are designed to make your abdomen stronger, because it’s a weak belly that causes back problems, mostly, counter-intuitively.

I have been doing a few more each day, working up to a manly number of reps. Today, I overdid it. After that last pushup, I just could not get up off the floor.

I’m glad grandson Joe wasn’t here to see that. Well, it would have been good if he’d been here, because he could have gotten me up. He’s 21 years old. But when he was three, he told his mother one day, “You know how I know Mammaw is old? ‘Cause she can’t get up off the flooorrr.” {Sounded like the Swedish Chef}

That was 17 years ago; imagine what he’d think now. About Bampaw this time, but the same observation.

But I learned two important things. First, do the job, and do it right, but save a little energy, just in case. Second, if you’re patient, and work out all the angles, your strength will return…and so will your wife, who is wondering what became of you, and she can help you get up. If you have no wife, observe only the first of these two rules.

John Robert McFarland

There is actually a third rule. I was so looking forward to being a special guest at The Royal Philosophical Society of Guys in Exile yesterday afternoon, via Zoom. A bunch of old friends that has always met in person before the quarantine, five hours from where I live now, and ten hours from where I lived before, so I never got to be with them. But with Zoom, we can meet from anywhere. I could see them, and they could see and hear me, but I got no sound. Turns out I just had to reboot my computer. That’s the third rule—restart.