ESSAY
WARNING!
Use Only Your Current Body.
By Wickham Boyle
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Illustration by Ira Blutrech
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The day after I helped my daughter, a tiny sylph of a young woman, help her male friend move heavy furniture up to her fifth-floor walk-up, the above alarum flashed through my head like a fat ribbon of yellow caution tape flapping in a rapid wind.
I now firmly believe that all of us 50-plusers need this warning to flash through our brains on a regular basis. It needs to be prominent, too, like the Surgeon General’s admonition on packs of cigarettes. CAUTION: Just because you remember lifting furniture or carrying nine bags of groceries home from the supermarket single-handedly at 30, 35, 40 – hell, at 45 – doesn’t mean that you should still be doing it at 55.
Nevertheless I was in my glory throughout that entire sweltering moving day. I carried heavy stuff, took the bottom – the end usually reserved for the stronger person – and was never the one to ask for a rest. The friend whose stuff my daughter had graciously agreed to store for the summer was a very out-of-shape 21-year-old, a vegan from California. I was out to show him what middle-aged moms were made of.
“How did you get to be such a wimp when you ma is so diesel?” he quipped to my daughter.
I wanted to tell them both, vegan and vegetarian, that my strength resulted from years of eating meat and yelling at children. But I kept my mouth shut. Attempting to shut up and focus is a valuable skill I am trying to master as I float past the mid-line of my life. So I toted and grunted and when the task was over I gulped down an entire carton of orange juice.
The next day I woke up wondering if I had unwittingly played in the NFL finals. I had a huge bruise on the pad of my left hand, and my back was gnarled. Not one to complain about minor physical ailments, however, I went about my business for three days before I finally wandered into my chiropractor’s office. As I lay on the bench and he put his magic hands on my back (especially the lower part that has been injured repeatedly throughout my life from playing sports and showing-off how strong I am), he exclaimed: “What did you do?”
“I drove the car up to the country and back, four hours.”
“And …?”
“I moved some furniture up five flights of stairs because my daughter couldn’t lift it and her friend was very weak and kept losing his grip.”
The chiropracter swung me around. “Are you crazy?”
“Well, yes. Have you met me?”
I recalled a story about a woman, older than I was. While running across a street, she was hit by a car. I knew this woman, a theater producer, and when it happened a thought popped into my head: She had probably done this a thousand times; you see the car and just zoom across.
How many times in the past had I moved furniture and felt fine? Even in middle age, I see a tree and believe I can climb it. I go out on the ledge to clean windows, and am surprised when my balance feels precarious. There are no conversion charts in my head; my wonderful brain sees everything in the present tense, and I am only starting to sense the danger.
Keeping this in mind, I drove 50 miles yesterday to the barn where a friend stored my good garden furniture, the wrought-iron stuff that never needs replacing but weighs a ton. I went by myself in the withering heat. I lifted the large chaise, three chairs, and a small table, and carefully pushed them into my station wagon.
When my husband is around, he tries to convince me that the stuff won’t fit, so I needed a weekend when he was traveling for work. Then I sweated buckets. The rain came down, and afterward the heat resumed full blast. I loaded and unloaded the garden furniture myself, and even bought a metal scrub brush to clean it.
But I did listen to the chiropracter; I lifted mindfully, and with the prescribed care. No random yanking. I was the balanced, knees bent, careful mover. This was not the woman from my past. But hell, I am not yet ready to turn in the moniker my daughter gave me – “TOUGH GIRL” – not for another 30 years. I’m off now to help a younger friend clean out her barn, happy to offer my strength.
