Tag: Gillian

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Memorials by Gillian

In the UK there is an expression, the Fortunate Fifty, referring to only fifty villages in the country, which did not lose even one man to the horrors of the First World War. Every other village has a war memorial, portraying a long list of those from the village killed in World War One, with a sad addendum below of those killed in World War Two. The second list is, thankfully, usually much shorter than the first.

The First World War was one of the deadliest in the history of mankind, with estimates of total deaths ranging from ten to fifteen million. In small villages it was so devastating because at that time all the men from the village served together, and frequently died together, so in many cases a village’s husbands, sons, brothers, sweethearts and neighbors all died on the same day, leaving the village essentially bereft of an entire generation of young men.

I was walking past one of these ubiquitous memorials one day, in some village in the north of England, I don’t even remember where I was or why.

Tudhoe Village War Memorial, United Kingdom
Photo by Peter Robinson used with permission.

I glanced at the tall granite pillar with the usual almost unbelievably long list of names, and an old farmer shuffled up to me. The tip of his gnarled old stick bumped down the names engraved in the stone.
“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

He stabbed his cane at the more recent list below,
“And then we showed the buggers again!”
He stomped off with evident satisfaction.

My mind turned to those old, grainy, jerky, black and white films taken in the trenches.
Did that young man, so fresh from his father’s farm, now lying in agony over the barbed wire of no-man’s-land, gasp with his dying breath,

“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

I doubt it.
Nor, I imagine, was it the last thought of the pilot of that Spitfire, plummeting to the ground in flames; he too injured to bail out.

In the nineteen-fifties I was on a train crossing northern France. We passed rows of identical white crosses. For miles and miles, they flowed up the hillsides and into the valleys. I had never seen such a sight. Nor have I since, come to that; just some of the countless dead of the First War. A French couple in the seat across from me waved their hands and jabbered animatedly. My French wasn’t good enough to get it all but I got the gist; a French version of,
“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

When I spent some time at a volunteer job in St. Petersburg a few years ago, my young interpreter took me to the Siege of Leningrad Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery. Half a million of the estimated 650,000 people who died during the 900-day blockade, are buried here. From 1941 to 1944 the population, cut off from supplies and constantly bombarded by planes and ground guns, starved to death.

There are heartbreaking photographs from that time, and stories which my escort, visibly puffed up with patriotic pride, translated for me. Of course she had not even been born then, neither come to that had her parents, but that fervor burned from her eyes.
“Mother Russia will never give in!”

I pictured the starving mother, huddling in the corner of the cellar in the bitter cold of a Russian winter, cuddling her starving children. Did she feel that? She, and the other 650,000, were given no choice.
Katya was waving a dramatic arm and saying something in emphatic Russian.
Clearly some approximation of, “Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

It never fails to sadden me, this surge of patriotism that seems to overtake so many people, of any generation and gender, when contemplating memorials. How will we ever see an end to the need for memorials for the war dead, when, instead of shedding sufficient tears to make Niagara look like a trickle, we continue our attitude, in any language, of,
“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Porn Scorn by Gillian

To be honest, I don’t scorn porn.

To do that I’d have to think about it, and I don’t.
I never have.
I barely, no joke intended, know what it is.

I have a vague vision of assorted people in assorted numbers and assorted combinations doing assorted things of which I can have no concept as my imagination begins to falter somewhere in, I suspect, the early stages of so-called ‘Soft Porn.’
The reason I don’t think about it is not that it freaks me out or sickens me, except for child porn, which is a different thing all together, I’m talking about consenting adult stuff here, but simply that it does not affect my life.

At least, as far as I know.
Perhaps in a general societal way it does, but for every study that shows it’s negative effects there’s a corresponding one demonstrating the opposite.

So, I simply don’t know.

What, I asked myself, if it affected me personally?
What if Betsy was in fact playing the lead in some geriatric triple X movie?

Or what if I discovered that she was off with a whole group of dirty old wrinklies watching dirty old movies when I thought she was at the Senior Center doing Yoga stretch?
Sorry, but really! Can you imagine this group?
What did he say?
I don’t think he said anything. It was kinda grunting.
What’s he doing now? Could you do that?
With my arthritis?
Did you ever do that?
If I did I don’t remember.

The fact is, that unless you want to fly away on attitudes and prejudices formed by others, it is realistically impossible to hold an informed opinion about a subject on which you are completely ignorant.

Every argument has an opposing one and statistics on pornography I imagine to be about as accurate as 1950 statistics on homosexuality.

As to fiscal concerns the guesstimate seems to be an average spending per capita of less than $50 per year, so nothing to break the family bank. And, by the way, I couldn’t help myself and I had to get something to compare that figure with, and found that in 2007, just as an example, the Iraq war budget equaled an annual per capita expense of $121 thousand, and hey, I don’t have to contribute via taxes to support porn watchers so…..no worries there either.

Perhaps in the end my lack of opinion and concern is simply a result of my naivety, and if I really knew what porn was, I would have definite opinions.
But at my age I doubt that I’m going to find out.

And this quotation from Erica Jong would scare me off.
I’d be afraid of staying too long.

She says,
“My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.”

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Bishop’s Castle and Beyond by Gillian

Bishop’s Castle, where I went to high school, is a tiny town on the border between England and Wales, and about as far from being a city as a settlement can get, but it’s what I had. It had a population of a little over a thousand then, and less than 1500 now. A prehistoric Bronze Age route runs from the town but there is evidence of human habitation there several thousand years before that.
In the early 1200s the Bishop of Hereford built a castle there, hence the name, and the settlement received royal borough status in 1249.
In 1642, the Three Tuns Brewery was established on its current site, making it the oldest licensed brewery site in Britain. Now that is a real claim to fame. Need I say that any time I visit my friends who still live in B.C. as it’s known locally, I make it a point to have a pint or two in the Three Tuns pub?
Some of my friends live in a row of cottages all with curved back walls and flanking a gently curving street, as the original curved castle wall was used as it stood when they were built in the 1600s.  
Now I see it as a fascinating spot alive with history, but of course when I was at school there I simply found it a peacefully boring backwater I couldn’t wait to leave.
I did leave a little piece of my heart there, though. Inevitably, I think, we are left with some fondness for anywhere we spend much time, even if it is all distorted by nostalgia.
And anyway, I was in love there.
I was in love everywhere.
In that serial monogamy existing, secretly, only in my mind, I have been in love everywhere I have lived, and so scattered other little pieces of my heart.

In B.C. I was in love with Sarah who now lives in New Zealand and is a great-grandmother.

Bishop’s Castle, with its few tiny medieval shops, was useless for serious shopping so for that we rode the local bus into Shrewsbury, a town of 100,000 now and maybe half that in the 1940s.
Shrewsbury was founded as a town in the 8th century, built on the site of the Roman town of Viriconium of which many beautiful parts remain. The earliest written mention of the town is from the year 901, when it was part an important border post between the Anglo-Saxons of England and the Britons in Wales. By the reign of Athelstan (925-939) coinage was being issued by the Shrewsbury mint and many coins from that time are still being unearthed today.
The town fell to Welsh forces led by Llywelyn the Great in 1215 and again in 1234. In 1283 Edward I held a Parliament, the first to include a House of Commons, at Shrewsbury to decide the fate of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last free Welsh ruler of Wales. Dafydd was executed – hanged, drawn and quartered – for high treason in Shrewsbury.
Personally, I prefer the history of the Three Tuns!
Later, after the formation of the Church of England, the town was offered  a cathedral  by Henry VIII, but for some undocumented reason the citizens of the town rejected this offer. 
I like to think they had enough sense to know that Henry Vlll was mad bad and dangerous to know and preferred to keep their distance.
One of Shrewsbury’s main claims to fame is that it was the home of Charles Darwin.

I was in love with Rosemary who sold her mother’s beautiful hand-knitted creations in the market held in the Shrewsbury town square every Saturday.

I left this tranquil corner and went to college in the rough tough and extremely polluted city of Sheffield which at that time was wall to wall steel mills belching endless plumes of black choking smoke. We used to have “smog days” when the whole city was instructed to shut down, with the exception, of course, of the factories actually producing the smog. Classes were cancelled, shops closed, no buses ran. We all stayed inside with doors and windows tightly shut and did our best not to breathe.
And don’t panic, we’re not going on another forced march through history but I do have to say that Sheffield is where stainless steel was invented and patented, and recent discoveries date human habitation of that area to the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.

My years in Sheffield were blessed or cursed, depending on my mood at the time, with a deeply felt and equally deeply hidden love for Jane, who had lost her home and family to German bombs.

Next it was across The Pond to New York City. That’s as far as the ship went so that’s far as I went, at least till I earned some money. It was late October and the stores were all hiring temps for the Xmas rush. For some reason I don’t even remember, I ended up at Altman’s on 5th Avenue. 
There’s a line in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, I can’t quote it exactly but the gist of it is that Hell is Altman’s department store at Xmas. It was all such a new and foreign world to me that I don’t think I was even capable of judging it as Hell, but it certainly was not my idea of Heaven. I mean, Bishop’s Castle can get a bit rowdy at the Three Tuns on a Saturday night, and those Sheffield foundry workers could quite frighten the opposition crowd at a soccer game, but those women battling for basement bargains at Altman’s took aggression to a whole new level. I had simply never experienced anything remotely like any of it.
But one thing I adored. 
In the display windows of Alman’s, and many other of the big department stores nearby, there were wonderful mechanical toys, animated depictions of Santa’s Workshop in one window, his slay and reindeer swooping over snowy rooftops in another, excited children opening presents in a third.
I was completely enchanted.
I had never seen such things in my life. Depressed post-war Europe had had no excess resources to squander on such things. Every coffee break I dashed outside to gaze at them along with crowds of little children. Children, not to mention a few adults, were less sophisticated in those days.
(Some years later I dragged my reluctant husband and step-children all the way from Jamestown in a snowstorm to see similar displays in the May D&F windows in Denver. Dean, a mechanical engineer, was interested objectively in their workings, The kids were clearly if politely mystified as to why we were there. The overall reaction was a resounding hmmmmm.)

The other bit of my heart that remains in New York was extracted that first Xmas Day of my life in this country, when some kind family took pity on my friends and me, poor hopeless helpless imigrantes, and invited us to their home.
How on earth we had met these people I don’t remember, but their chauffeur-driven Cadillac carried us in a style I had never known to a mansion somewhere on Long Island. There were Xmas lights in the trees with bigger, richer lights blazing in the windows. Our gracious hosts had gifts for each of us, and managed to make us feel like much-loved daughters returning home for the holidays. 
I can’t remember their name or where exactly they lived, but I have never forgotten that Xmas and that family’s kindness to strangers. So, yes, New York does hold on to little pieces of my heart.

And anyway I was madly, secretly, in love. Infatuated with Lucie, the woman I had followed to New York as I would have followed her to Timbuktu.
And I did.

Well, I followed her to Houston: much the same thing.
This was as strange and foreign a world to me as New York City but in a very different way, and there for the first time in my life I encountered blatant discrimination.
I worked as a waitress at a diner in a new sprawling outdoor shopping mall in a completely white part of town. On my second day, I served coffee to two black people. Now this was the early sixties and racial discrimination was no longer legal, but I guess Texas, along with many parts of the South at that time, simply ignored that little detail. I was told to refuse to serve them any food and ask them to leave.
Needless to say, that was the end of my job at that café, but if I thank Houston for little else, I am grateful for it slapping me in the face with the realities of certain aspects of life in the Land of the Free.

I finally broke free of my obsession with Lucie, who married a multi-millionaire Texan and now lives in Venezuela.

Yes, I had scattered bits of my heart about, but it was intact enough to engulf Denver when I arrived here, and later, my beautiful Betsy.

1954’s #1 hit was Doris Day singing:

          Once I Had a Secret Love
          That lived within the heart of me
          All too soon my secret love
          Became impatient to be free

          So I told a friendly star
          The way that dreamers often do
          Just how wonderful you are
          And why I am so in love with you

          Now I shout it from the highest hills
          Even told the golden daffodils

          At last my heart’s an open door
          And my secret love’s no secret anymore

My love is certainly no secret, anymore.

1/23/2012


About the Author





I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.







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Depravity by Gillian

God I hate that word. I think because it is so often linked, by
those who condemn us, with homosexuality.
I know its origin is theological and all about Original Sin and
dates back to St Augustine, but that has little to do with its general usage
today.
(That same St Augustine, by the way, who is widely quoted as
having said, ‘God give me chastity and continence, but not yet’.)
The most-used definition seems to be moral corruption.
Now I don’t really mind the term moral/immoral, despite it’s
judgment there’s something soft and round and benign about it.
Corruption, according to Wikipedia, is, in terms of morality,
spiritual or moral impurity or deviation from an ideal.
Well, O.K., I don’t buy any of it with reference to homosexuality,
but it doesn’t have that heavy, hard-edged hatred to it that depravity has.
Synonyms offered for depravity range from baseness, contamination,
debauchery and  degeneracy all the way to
sinfulness, wickedness and downright evil.
Well excuse me, but that
just aint me.
The antonyms are things like good, honor, justice, morality and
virtue.
Call me delusional but I know that in my queerness I have my fair
share of all those qualities.
Perhaps, I thought, when I began pondering this topic, perhaps I
exaggerate in my own head the frequent connection of the word depravity with
homosexuality.
So I asked the expert.
I asked Mr. Google because Mr. Google knows everything.
Homosexual depravity got 2,220,000 results.
It’s not in my head.
A delightful Massachusetts group called Massresistance writes
about a high school play performed this Thanksgiving.  They title the article Depraved Homosexual
Musical and describe it this way.
The family deals with the husband’s
flagrant sexual relationship with another man, as well as their lesbian
neighbors, along with a heavy doses of profanity and general depravity.
Yup, sounds
pretty sinful to me.
Incidentally
the play apparently has a song which I’d love to hear, called
Don’t Make Noise But Daddy’s Kissing Boys.
The Christian
Action Network describes Gay Day at Disneyworld as an orgy of depravity.
‘We can’t
begin to describe the things we saw’.
Which begs an
obvious question, then, why were you
there??
I have to
thank this group for choosing a topic at which I originally cringed.
In thinking
about it I have seen its absurdity, or I should say the absurdity of those
little, mean, shriveled-up people who abuse the word the way they do.
They should
stick with St. Augustine who also, supposedly, said,
‘Love, and do
what you like.’
December 2011

About the Author



I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.



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Going Pink by Gillian

I used to blush very easily.
“Going pink” simply wouldn’t do it justice, though; rather “glowing crimson’’ or “flowing vermilion.”
I would feel this rising tide of burning glowing lava climbing up my neck and spreading voraciously across my cheeks to turn my ears into pulsating heat sinks.
Embarrassment engendered this rush of hot color, and so did anger, and in my younger days I’m not sure which came upon me more frequently.
I often found myself embarrassed, and often lost my temper, and it was often ugly.

Over the years I guess I got my emotions under better control.
I rarely lose my temper these days, having discovered better ways to channel my energy.
I rarely feel embarrassed, probably because I have become immune to it after making an ass of myself so many times in so many ways over so many years. Also, quite honestly, the older I get the less I care what others think of me and if sometimes there are some laughs at my expense, so what? Enjoy it as my gift, freely given.

But I’m left with a guilty secret, which I have shared with very few people.
I rarely blush visibly any more, yet sometimes I still feel that hot red flush, but confined on the invisible inside of me rather than on the visible outside.
So I’m the only one who knows that I have once more embarrassed myself.
Because I do care what I think of me, of my internal thought processes and reactions.
And the terrible thing about thoughts is that you absolutely cannot unthink them.
No matter how hard you try, no matter how loudly you say to your self, oh how could I have thought that, it doesn’t evaporate.

Less often, I’m proud to report, but still occasionally my gut reaction is completely mortifying to me. It may be racial, ageist, sexist, and yes, homophobic. How can that be? I consider myself a totally inclusive person completely free of all prejudice.
Sometimes my unbidden thoughts are superior, scornful, mocking, derisive. How can that be? I consider myself a totally inclusive person completely free of judgment.
When these unthinkable thoughts leap up in me, I feel an embarrassment before myself so much worse than any I ever felt before others and that invisible red-hot lava curls around my guts.

Where do these thoughts come from? It’s as if some prehistoric part of me remains deep inside my psyche, some part which did not evolve along with the rest of me, thinking things which not only would I never dream of saying now, but I’m sure I never in my life would have said.
I doubt I will ever understand why this happens, and I guess the fact that I find it repulsive and horrifying says a lot in my own defense.

But going pink, or glowing crimson, has a whole lot deeper, scarier meaning to me than frequently flushed pink cheeks.

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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I Can’t Change it, Can I? by Gillian

TV images double time on the screen.
Grainy monochrome figures rushing to trenches,
cheering and laughing and slaps on the back.
Scrambling now into no-man’s-land,
not laughing but screaming, hanging on wire.
Then hobbling home, shell-shocked and shaking,
the lucky ones.

Well I can’t change it can I?
It’s all time gone by.
Have some more chips and dip.

TV images now retouched and colored.
Tough young GIs run and fall on the beaches
screaming for medics and mother and home.
Gazing now in horror at Auschwitz
turning skeletons free to a horrified world.
We must never forget we say and we mean it.
How soon we forget.

Well I can’t change it can I?
It’s all time gone by.
Let’s have some more popcorn.

TV images now moving in real time.
Countless dead in Rwanda and raped in Darfur
screaming for help while the TV world watches.
Is this now, is it real? We’re not quite sure.
I send ten dollars to an 800 number
that lies on the screen in the blood and the gore.
I can do no more.

Well I can’t change it can I?
It’s too far away.
Let’s have some more pizza.

TV images now look quite ordinary.
Our leaders all lie and our bankers are crooks
our country is broke, all except for the rich.
Gazing now in horror at Congress,
they fill their deep pockets, care nothing for us.

All that they want to do is what’s best for them.
I just ignore it.

Well I can’t change it can I?
It’s all gone too far.
Let’s have one more beer.

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Acting by Gillian

I have often said that members of the GLBT community are the best actors around. Most of us played a part for at least some of our lives after all: a few for most or even all of it.
I’m not so sure it was acting though, in my case at least, and I can only speak for myself.
I don’t know what it was, and I have never tried to write about it before so who knows what sense it will make.

But here goes.

I’m tempted to say, I was two people, but that’s not quite right; not what I understand, and admittedly that’s very little, schizophrenia to be.
It was not that I had more than one personality and they were interchangeable, coming and going on some undisclosed schedule. 
They certainly were not equal partners.
Rather, my body was off doing its own thing while the real me, whatever form that took, was separate, flitting about somewhere, watching what my body was up to.
I mean, how weird is that?
I have described this, verbally, to a few other GLBT people, but have yet to hear anyone say
Oh yes I know exactly what you mean …… it was just the same for me ……. anything like that.

But anyway ……. Back to my body and soul. Not that I pretend to grasp the meaning of the word soul but it’s the best I can do given the situation; something other than, quite apart from, my body.
My body went on its merry way: working, marrying, raising kids.
I watched. Rather like watching a play.

I didn’t judge.
I didn’t advise.
I observed.
I felt nothing.

That body was not me. At least the life it lived was not.
The bodily me was not unhappy. The bodily me felt very little.
It was not happy, neither was it unhappy.
It just was.

This continued until around forty, when I was swept away in an avalanche of emotion and came out. 
To myself, and that was all that mattered.
I will never forget that moment when I knew, unequivocally, what and who I was.
The two parts of me came together.
They had never been joined.
Not as long as I could remember.
Now they were.
Now we were.

I have been one ever since.

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Deepest Passion by Gillian

Passion
is that whip-crack of thunder
following
the lightning flash across the sky
no
time to breath
It‘s
the forest fire of red white heat
urged
on by the winds flashing and cracking
no-one
can stop it
It’s
the wild wet waves crashing, smashing
against
the rusty red rocks
shattering
into wild wet pieces
that
re-form to recede at peace
only
to return
It’s
the early snow that softly falls
whispering
to dry autumn leaves
the
perfect flake clings to your skin
to
melt there
Passion
is a billion stars
in
an endless black night
and
the sudden lone howl of a wolf.
© August 29, 2011
 About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Communication by Gillian

My dad was a quiet, almost silent, man.

I never use the word taciturn in his case because that has a certain negative connotation and my father’s silence seemed one of peace and contentment.

He just felt little need of words.

In fact one of the dictionaries’ synonyms for taciturn is uncommunicative which my father most definitely was not, he simply communicated in other ways.

He never once told me he loved me, but I never once doubted it.

We had an ancient chopping block sawn from the trunk of a fallen oak tree.  My dad split logs on it as his father and grandfather had done. It was very hard wood but it had been slowly worn down to a shadow of its former self by three generations of abuse.

On one of my last trips back home he handed me a circular wooden chain, which, he actually did tell me in words, was carved from the old chopping block.

It is one of my most cherished possessions.

I cannot imagine how long it took him to carve this intricate creation from that tough old wood, and when I cleared up the shed after his death I found many rejects and practice bits and false starts tossed on the woodpile, and some complete chains which were not, apparently, just perfect.
For me it had to be perfect.
Communication comes in many forms.
This beautiful gift expresses Dad’s love for me in a way no words could ever do, and it lasts a whole lot longer.

Me with my dad in 1948

       

                                                              

About the Author

 

I was born and raised in England. After
graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered
Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965,
working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got
divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have
now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Natural Enemies by Gillian

          Where we live in Lakewood there are several Rec. Centers within a few miles, and through Kaiser’s Silver Sneakers program membership to all of them, including 24 Hour Fitness, is free.

          So I have a stack of membership cards of which I was quite proud until Betsy the physical fitness freak explained patiently to me one day that the cards themselves in fact do very little to improve my fitness.

          I have to go to these godawful places.

          And worse than that, I have to stay there. For an hour, two, or even three.

          And still worse, I have to do unspeakable things while I’m there.

          Ah well, I suspect The Gym and I are simply natural enemies in the way of the fabled snake and mongoose. I will never learn to love it, but if I could simply leave my body there to get on with it and send my mind off elsewhere it wouldn’t really be too bad.

          However, much as The Gym is the epitome of mindless activity, there are pitfalls associated with excusing my brain from attendance.

          I find it necessary to count and/or time my activities, or else I cheat; 100 of this repetition, 50 of that, ten minutes on this machine, fifteen on that.

          I would so much prefer not to think of any of it and free my mind to write about our current week’s topic or listen to a book on CD, but alas I’ve found that when I try this, my workout is miraculously curtailed. Twenty minutes and I’m done!

          Well I thought I did at least 100 leg lifts, and surely I sweated on that machine for half an hour?

          No, I’m not to be trusted, so my mind must remain in the dreaded gym with my body at all times.

          By it’s very nature, the Gym is an unlovely place.

          But those who are in charge seem to go out of their way to add to the awfulness in all possible ways.

          Walls of mirrors, for God’s sake! What’s that about? Whatever nasty activity I’m performing I’m forced to see myself at it from ten different angles with no place to go to get away from myself.

          Now perhaps some of those young svelte creatures, bodies apparently not yet affected by the pull of gravity and clearly created without sweat glands, like nothing better than watching themselves in fluid effortless motion.

          And, I have to admit, why not? Their brightly colored form-fitting Spandex clings to every perfect curve without even a hint of one ounce of excess fat.

          I on the other hand am in little danger of engendering narcissism as I catch glances, no matter how hard I try not to, of this lumbering old body draped in ragged sweats, huffing and puffing amidst rolls of misplaced misshapen flabby flesh.

          It really should be confined to the privacy of it’s on home.

          So, yes, I try not to look at the mirrors which grace every wall, but what other choices are there?

          I can of course simply gaze with longing upon the aforementioned nubile young things, but I’m forced to confess that palls after only a few minutes.

          At my age it’s a bit like a dog chasing a car. Whatever would I do if I caught one??

          What does that leave? Oh God forbid, the TV. Banks of them, high up on the wall beyond the reach of prying hands hoping to change channels.

           Oh no! You will watch what they, whoever they may be, want you to watch or whatever they have decided you should want to watch. That means half a dozen sets tuned to ESPN and the rest of them showing FOX News. The latter is definitely not on my agenda so that leaves endless replays of Sunday’s NFL games or, no, wait a minute, there’s live football…oh, but it’s two local high school teams and the score is 73 to 3 – and it’s still the first half.

          The best, perhaps the only entertainment provided by the TV is the automated translation of the spoken word into printed words on the screen, as of course all the sets are muted.

          The computer programs which perform this function work much better than they did not so long ago but they still fall into frequent misinterpretation.

          President Obama undressed Congress. Now there’s an ugly vision.

          Dozens of thinks roll down the streets of Lybia. In fact a few thinks might be more beneficial than tanks….but..

          Well at least it’s good for a laugh, which is something not widely on offer at the Gym. This is a serious place.

          And that’s just one more reason I don’t like it, and I suspect it doesn’t particularly care for me. I don’t greatly enhance its image after all.

          But, like that snake and mongoose or the wolf and the moose or many other of nature’s natural enemies, The Gym and I need each other and so our fraught relationship continues.

          As it will, with luck, for many years to come.

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.