'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Ballroom Days

My grandmother lived near the top of a very steep hill. She and I used to bicycle down to the village and back. Strangely, I can’t recall the thrill of flying down the slope, but I vividly remember the sweat of pedalling back up. There came a day when Gran could not make it all the way and had to push the bike up the last bit. She saw a practical aspect to this. It would help her gauge her strength as the years went by, and over the course of time she did in fact monitor her aging by the distance she could bicycle up the hill.

They say that you reach your physical peak in your teens or early twenties. I was a pretty good competition swimmer at school, but have always felt that my form was best between thirty-five and forty. I suppose most people are busy working and raising a family at that age, but I found myself living by a beach, writing some books and working out a lot. I had expected to find some deterioration since my teens, but particularly in terms of stamina and strength, I actually won out. A friend who is in that ‘middle’ age right now and works out every morning has the same impression.

But when you reach fifty you are on the slippery slope. There is no getting away from it. I could still run five miles in the evening without difficulty, but at around fifty-five running on anything other than sand or a treadmill caused tendon sprains, so I went to the gym. That was ten years ago, and I am now pretty much where Gran was at, watching the rot set in.

I was taking in an exhibition of fauvist art the other day, works from the very early twentieth century. It suddenly struck me how the nudes, mostly men and women in their thirties and forties had bodies that looked older than mine does today. Unless those people were in ‘the flush of youth’ their skin just sagged. Their life was full of exertion, more than ours today, but it wasn’t a physical work-out and they didn’t look ‘in shape’ although they may have been healthy inside. This made me think of those perfectly sculpted specimens who look the picture of health, but keel over from excessive exercise, or incur some impairment. The lesson is, as you get older you had better see the writing on the wall and adjust accordingly.

I have still been running a mile or so, on the soft, beach sand. I have the strength and lungs to do it, but my joints are starting to complain. I guess it’s time to call it a day and look for another way to pump the blood around my system. “Your ballroom days are over, baby!” Jim Morrison was wont to sneer. He was talking about revolution, but they came to mind when I was considering my plight. Well come to think of it Jim, maybe they are not. Maybe they are just beginning.      

       

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