Lifting life's weight at the gym

By Marc Munroe Dion

Syndicated columnist

It starts the way a million stories start.

"I know a guy ... "

And I do. Friend of mine. I've known him for at least 30 years, and our friendship lived at the long wood bar of a corporate steakhouse with 16 televisions and pictures of baseball players on the walls. Neither one of us likes sports, though I'll watch a boxing match every few months.

He's a couple years older than I am. I was a newspaper reporter. He was a restaurant manager. He was my best man. He's not married, though he was a long time before we met. Neither of us have kids.

A few nights a week, we sat at that bar for two beers and we complained.

We complained about our jobs mostly, though we didn't really know anything about each other's jobs. That was good because that way, when the other guy complained, you couldn't second guess him.

So, our couple beers together offered no solutions, just a recitation of grievances, which was all we wanted. We'd had enough possible solutions. What we wanted was agreement and sympathy.

He had a stroke 10 years ago. It put him on a cane. He continued to work for a few more years, committing an act of great courage that is remembered nowhere. He fell a couple times at work. He retired early. I retired some years later.

He had a couple more strokes last month, bad ones, and he's in a room in a hospital about three minutes from my house. I go visit him every day because it's so close. I'm no hero.

He complains now. I'm retired, happily married, without much to do. I own two cats and hundreds of books. I'm all right.

He doesn't know where he's going next. He says that to me.

"I don't know where I'm going," he says. "It's out of my hands."

And there's a whiteboard on the wall of his room, and there's a note on it that says the rehab people got him to walk 120 feet today.

And I sit on his bed, and he sits in a chair, and there's a television on, but the sound is turned off. Doctors and rehab people come in to talk to him, and I go wait in the hall.

I've done it before. My mother. My father. My in-laws. My wife. Friends. You talk for a while, and you leave, and they don't leave, not that day.

"Got anything planned for today?" he says.

"I'm going to the gym later," I say. "Deborah is sending me to the grocery store, too."

I take a Creamsicle-colored sticky note from my shirt pocket.

"See?" I say. "She made me a list. It's like I'm 9 years old. I got a list."

We both laugh.

I made the joke about the list because I felt bad when I told him I was going to the gym. They have a place in the hospital they call "the gym," but it's not like a real gym. There are no girls in leggings or tattooed young guys, and you can't buy sports drinks, and there's no tanning bed. He goes there, and they get him to walk 120 feet, and they write it on the wall.

I went to the gym that day. I go three days a week. I pushed the weight up, and I let it back down, and I counted reps, and I felt like a car that's been repaired with off-brand parts.

Life's not sad. Life's a damn fine place. That's why it surprises us so much when it's not.

This column is done. I'm going into the living room and having a couple of beers, on the couch, by myself.

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