Outta My Way!

The “good” brothers and lay teachers at St. Laurence High School were a grade-happy lot.  They handed out grades by the quarter and semester and for the year, six grades per subject per year.  Of my twenty-six grades for phys. ed., I managed twenty-five Cs and one B.  You try doing four-count burpies in the school parking lot.

 

All those Cs probably explain my exercise regimen these many years later; I treat every day like it’s a gym test, and the idea is to get an A so I don’t have to repeat class with Mr. Haughwout or Mr. Schwarz.  These were gentlemen prone to confuse gym with combat.  Dizzy stick, anyone?

 

So, I go through exercycles one after another and shoot for a daily A in pushups and sit ups.  Maybe I’ll live to a hundred, maybe I won’t.  But I won’t spend eternity repeating gym, if I can help it.

 

One problem, though.  At St. Laurence, we didn’t have basset hounds wandering the premises, poking their heads where they don’t belong.  For a breed not known for exertion unrelated to eating, the bassets in my life have always been interested in my exercising.  Every exercise is a game of chicken for them, I swear.

 

Penny, aka Satan, loves to park herself as close as she can to where she thinks my head will land on sit ups; the slightest miscalculation makes for headaches and scooting bodies.  But never does she want to sit anywhere but as near to me as possible.

 

Pushups, she’ll poke my thigh or sniff my hair.  If I touch my toes, she tries to bite my fingers.  With weights, it’s another game of “how close can I get?”, only it’s a lot scarier than with sit ups.  If I hit her with a dumbbell, call canine 911.

 

The only thing she’ll let me do is bike.  Thelma, Penny’s sainted predecessor, was just the opposite.  The first half of her life, she tried to lay as close to the spinning peddles as possible.  The second half, she’d jump up on the couch and lay directly behind me, after which she immediately fell asleep.  The peddles, chain and flywheel made a most delightful whir in those big ears of hers.

I don’t miss high school or any of my gym teachers.  It’s my exercise partners I can’t seem to live without.