Muscles

Muscles. I grew up with muscles—flexed muscles, tattooed muscles, vein-popping muscles, strained muscles, pulsating muscles, and, eventually, sagging muscles, puny muscles, and no muscles at all. They weren't my muscles; they were my father's.

I’m all for staying in shape. It’s not a passion of mine; rather, it’s a habit left over from growing up with a man who lifted weights and liked the way he looked, especially on the beach, where he’d strut to the water’s edge with the self-assurance of a hawk in a chicken coop. He turned heads and knew it. He had a great ship tattooed on his chest and liked to flex his pectorals, which would make the ship bounce up and down.

“Do it again!” my daughter Shana used to plead. And he’d cause the ship to toss and turn across his chest, which also caused my daughters to laugh.

Building and keeping those muscles involved a lot of work, but he always laughed and said it was just something he did because that's what he did. 

He had been a waifish, skin-and-bone adolescent who had been maltreated and mal-loved by life, by parents who didn’t have much to do with him, and by teachers who didn’t mind reminding him of his stupendously sorry-assed, chicken-sized brain—perhaps a little hyperbole here, but that's the message he gleaned from the thorny valley that was his childhood. It should be no surprise, then, that bodybuilding and chasing women became his way of life. They were quick fixes that often worked so well they seemed just as efficacious as any long-term fix.

“Wow, your father’s so handsome. He's in such good shape,” the ladies, young and not so young, would gush.

“Yes, he lifts weights and exercises,” I would explain, although I was never sure why.

“Hmmmm," the ladies, young and not so young, would ponder aloud. "Maybe I could go visit him and get some advice about exercise.”

“I guess,” haltingly, clumsily, stupidly surprised that the friendship sought wasn't mine.

“Really? Okay. If you think he wouldn't mind.” 

And the ladies would ask him to show them how they could build a little muscle here and there on their bodies. “Of course, I don’t want big muscles like a man, like you; I just want, you know, to be firm. Here, feel this. Don’t you think I need to be firmer?”

And my father would show them the exercises they needed to keep themselves, you know, firm. And off they would go to do their sit ups or pushups or bending at the waistline—one-two-one-two—some returning in a minute, some in an hour, only a few not at all.

Time has a great sense of humor, for the parade of ladies eventually thinned to a trickle; the orchestra lost, first its lively horn section, then its more plaintive and serious string section, and finally its aging conductor. For its final coup de grace, time stuck out its foot and tripped my father into the pit where Alzheimer's awaits its charges with a certain undeniable glee. There, it stripped the muscles, sinews, and flesh from my father's body, reducing his gloriously sculpted housing to brittle bone, fragmenting his mind into countless pieces of puzzles unsolvable, scattered them into a confusion of constellations light years beyond both space and time.

If I could speak to him, I'd ask my father if he would now declare his lifetime pursuit of muscles the biggest waste of time ever. Would time have been kinder to him had he chosen to pursue, say, needlepoint or ice fishing?

And while I’m guessing at his answer—the one that will never come—I’m just going to strap on some ankle weights and do a few reverse crunchies, and perhaps I’ll add a few biceps presses. Silly really. But it’s something I have to do, because it is what I do.

PS: The last time I saw my father, he studied my face for a long moment and said, "I don't know who you are, but you like like someone I ought to love." We thought that was a very funny notion, and we did laugh.