Inland, Dreaming of Waves

My body is floating in space

If you can identify the source of the quote above, I'll ... I'll ... mention that on my next blog. I swear.

I got the J. Jill catalogue today, and one of their t-shirts gave me a flashback to my junior high gym outfit. In those days (the 1970s) we were required to wear a gym outfit, which was a lovely one-piece double-knit thing with blue shorts and a blue and gray striped sleeveless top and a zipper running from groin to neck. I hope schools have stopped torturing middle schoolers with ugly one-size-fits-all outfits--if they even have middle school gym anymore. I can't remember if we had to wear those things in the winter, and I'm pretty sure that when we had dancing lessons in gym class, we could wear regular clothes. Of course, the regular clothes hardly compensated for the anxiety of inching forward through the line, girls on one side and guys on the other, and wondering what nerd you were going to have to dance with. I learned the hora in that class, though I can't remember it now. I learned how to do simple vaults--flying over a vault at high speed was about as much ecstasy as I ever got in junior high. I even took a crack at the balance beam, though it terrified me.

I hated middle school, but sometimes I wish I could go back and get the body I had then. For years now I've been trying to tame my flabby middle. I get down to the high 140s and then up I go again. I'd like to feel my waist without pinching 2 inches. The problem is I have an equally great desire to eat chocolate at all times. I had a piece of fudge last night, a huge chunk of chocolate cake the night before--and at those times, the way my stomach was sticking out in Krav Maga today doesn't occur to me.

The nicest thing about being a teenager was that I could eat anything I wanted and still be 115 pounds. I didn't have the body issues then that so many people have now. So many girls (and even guys) worry about dieting before they've even gotten to college. I was lucky not to go through that.

Now, I guess, everyone worries about being fit. Teenagers in the 1970s didn't care so much. Title 9 had just been passed in 1972; girls were just beginning to participate in sports when I got to middle school in 1974. There was a willowy blond named Brooke who went out for the boys' track team because there wasn't a girls' team at Center High School in Kansas City. I asked her once if she could keep up with the boys, and she said no, they were faster.

The only time I've been perfectly fit in my life was my first semester of college. I was on the crew team at Georgetown for that semester, and we had to jog down to the boathouse, carry the sculls to the dock, and then row for an hour and a half. Rowing is the perfect exercise, believe me, but I couldn't stand having to get up at 5:30 every morning, and I was never one of those people who could party until 3 am Friday night and then get up early Saturday to row.

Lots of times I wish I'd stayed on the team another semester so that I could have been in a real race. There was one time when we were out on the Potomac (it was really polluted in those days; you couldn't drink it from the boat) in an eight (it really has 9 people because the coxswain is crouched in the bow [or is it the stern?] calling out strokes). And we got a rhythm going that felt amazing--all of us rowing in time. I tried to recreate that feeling at the 20-year reunion last June, but when I got to the boathouse, there were all these super-competitive men talking about "balance" and "pull" and only a couple women. I thought, crap, I don't want to get in a race here; I just want to get out on the water and row for the first time in 20 years. So I skipped it. Maybe I'll row sometime on the Boulder reservoir; there's a club there.

posted by Price of Silence @ 3:32 PM