LITTLE ROCK — Today Jennifer, my fellow Sunday Style columnist, discusses the issue of falling down. I'm here to discuss the issue of getting up.
Not getting up in a figurative sense, as in last week's passing mention of falling from grace and then lifting one's self back into respectability.
I mean, simply, getting up out of a chair. And the increasing difficulty in accomplishing such a feat as one ages, in spite of frantic exercise and stretching sessions designed to keep Father Time, and Mother Fat, at bay.
I pondered the issue of mobility after participating in the Little Rock incarnation of Race for the Cure, the fundraising 5K run-walk executed on behalf of breast cancer awareness and research. It was my first timeparticipating since 2004; I'd registered but had a conflict in 2005, and last year procrastinated myself into nonparticipation.
The 2007 race was a grand old time. Members of our team - Carousel Fit-4-Life Wellness Center - distinguished ourselves via pink hair extensions. Husband Dre, who was very touched to see that many participants in a race with a cause, was amongthe many fellows who cheered us from the sidelines.
But as had happened in '04, the stiffness and soreness came soon afterward, in spite of preevent warm-up moves and post-event stretching. Every effort to get back up more than five minutes after sitting down brought memories of my late Aunt Hat'Lee. Before the stroke that took away her ability to walk altogether, getting out of a chair for Aunt Hat'Lee was a fairly lengthy process usually accompanied by unearthly grunts and groans.
I thought about my aunt because I was practically channeling her.
This is what getting older is like. When it's time to get up from a chair, you have to brace yourself. Count to three. Do theequivalent of a running jump - lean back, digging yourself in the couch cushions, then sort of jerk forward, hoping the momentum will get you all the way up. If it doesn't, you do one of those five-parters: Brace yourself; do the running jump; come to a stop while halfway up, knees bent; brace yourself once again (that's where the grunts and groans come in); then - to misquote the Old Testament's Song of Songs - arise, fair one, and stagger away!
"You just need to get outside and walk" rather than always exercising inside, opined Dre, who has lived all his adult life without a car and is used to walking wherever he goes.
That may be. Pounding the pavement and walking a treadmill are certainly two very differentthings. And when one continues to perform a particular exercise regularly, the initial soreness caused by that exercise usually skedaddles.
But even when I have not speed-walked three miles through Little Rock and North Little Rock with funny pink hair, getting up is an effort sometimes. Getting up after doing floor warm-ups and exercises in the gym is often a multi-part process that, on good days, can be done in about three smooth movements. (If somebody's watching, I hope for a good day.)
Years ago I looked in one of those catalogs that, when you're young, you dismiss as being for "old people" because it has all these weird wraps and bandages you put on your feet, motor-y things you stick up your nose andcontraptions you install around the house to help you get around. The contraption at which I shook my head in bemusement was one that helped to propel people out of their seats. Now I actually find comfort in the fact there are such things as lift chairs and bed lifts and bath lifts and toilet-seat lifts and "geri chairs" and such.
Most of all, I've realized where patience truly comes from: empathy. Being forced by time and/or circumstances to set sail in the same boat at which I once rolled my eyes.
Now excuse me. I gotta get up out of this chair, and the effort to do so is quite the Broadway production, if you care to watch. Unnnnngh.
Lift those fingers and e-mail:
Style, Pages 62 on 10/28/2007