Seventy. My new age. Never did I think I would end up here at the place where you really know you’re near the end — not the end of a sentence or a paragraph or even a chapter, but THE END.
And yet, I feel like I’ve started a new beginning. I have this sense of freedom — of life on my own. Not “Lynne Alone” in a dreary, clamped-down, barely-surviving mode, but Lynne with a still healthy-enough body and mind to LIVE.
And how will that be?
I step out into the world to try Zumba classes at the local YMCA. After the first ten minutes of class I am both winded and mortified by my inept attempts to follow the teacher’s steps.
But I stay for the hour. And I promise myself I will go to Zumba once a week for six months before I allow myself to quit.
I buy Zumba dance shoes and Zumba lessons on a dvd so that I can practice at home. I have always been a good and conscientious student and I apply myself to Zumba.
I meet a good friend at the Y, the friend who introduced me to Zumba. We don’t drive together because she goes an hour earlier in order to use the weight machines first. Then she eats a healthy snack in the lounge, and that’s where I meet up with her before class starts.
This good friend tells me that Zumba is her favorite hour of the week. I am hopeful that it will someday become mine.
About three months later, I actually have a day when I don’t hate Zumba class for the whole hour. I have started to get the knack of executing some of the steps, keeping the rhythm, moving in sync with the class.
I am so happy. I see this as a possible breakthrough for me. Maybe each coming week I will have more and more good times in Zumba class. And I am always happy to spend an hour with my friend.
The next week our teacher says she has just come back from a Zumba conference and that she brought three new songs back with her. That day we do not dance my favorite songs. They are replaced by the three new songs.
I hated the whole hour of Zumba that day.
Now it’s been five and a half months since I started Zumba. I still hate it.
Monday I confessed to my friend that I was not going back to Zumba ever again.
I found something new to try, something more modest in aspiration: strength training class at the senior center.
“You’re going to that class with all the old people?” my sister says.
“Yes.” I am seventy years old now and I’m allowed to go to a class for old people.
When I walked into the large room at the senior center — early, like I get to everything — there were a couple frail old ladies with white hair setting out chairs and small weights. I introduced myself and they told me to get a chair and some weights.
Have I made a huge mistake? Do they perform all the exercises sitting in a chair?
Gradually more women filtered into the room and they were not all white haired and frail. One man showed up, too, but he was white-haired and extremely frail. When the teacher tried to get him to move his arm a particular way later in the class, he said, “My arm doesn’t go that way.”
He sat in the front row, two feet in front of the teacher. I sat in the front row, too, but close to the door, just in case.
As it turned out, we did not do all our exercises sitting down —only half of them.
The class contained a very respectable amount of stretching and weight lifting to strengthen our muscles. It even had a tiny whiff of aerobics at the beginning to make sure we were all present and awake.
At the half-way water break, the teacher told me I was doing great.
My Zumba teacher never told me that. Instead, she would periodically notice me floundering and come dance next to me as if that was going to magically correct my performance.
I was the absolutely worst dancer in my Zumba class.
In strength training at the senior center I have a chance to rise to the top of the class, if I’m not there already. I was in the front row so I couldn’t watch everyone.
After my first Zumba class, every muscle in my body ached.
After strength training at the senior center, I feel ready to tackle anything.
Lynne Taetzsch:
Website: http://www.ARTBYLT.COM
Art Blog: http://www.abstract-art-blog.net
