Up the River

So what’s the deal with park benches? I love their rustic mossiness and their sweet epitaphs to deceased friends and family dogs. But they have a notable design flaw. They’re clearly sized to accommodate several bottoms, which suggests they’re intended for socializing. But to have a conversation, the owners of those bottoms have to twist their necks to one side or the other, causing pain to those of us with tech neck—i.e., me and everyone I know. If I ran the world, I would make benches that faced each other, preferably flanking a table for chatting friends to prop their elbows on to support their weary heads.  

So sad to realize that the word “midlife” no longer pertains to me. On the bright side, I no longer need fear a midlife crisis. On the bleak side, I will almost certainly face an end-of-life crisis.

Not long ago, a commenter posted to a Gothamist story about vaccination, “Life is worthless, particularly for the old and sick. Let ’em die!” Though startling, this was just a harsher expression of the widely held, mostly suppressed contempt behind the OK Boomer meme. Younger folks are just so over older folks. And I take that to heart. Most of my friends and I are colossal, complacent, out-of-touch bores. And truly our time is almost up.  The pandemic has merely heightened the clarity of just how close our time is to being up. Virus or no virus, we’re on the precipice. Though I lost only one friend to the coronavirus, someone I hadn’t see in decades, I did lose several friends to other illnesses during the past year. And their deaths have driven home how quickly and unexpectedly life can change and send you plummeting toward death. For some people, this awareness might create an impulse to seize the moment, avoid wasting a second of “your one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver ca

I haven’t written about yoga for a long time, not since the days of Under the Stinkwood Tree ( http://underthestinkwoodtree.blogspot.com/ ), but I continue to “flop around,” as my husband puts it, several times a week. Like many other people, I’ve found the pandemic conducive to practicing. For one thing, there are fewer other activities competing for my participation. For another, Zoom makes it ridiculously easy to attend classes—no need to even lace up your shoes.  Though I haven’t written about yoga lately, its magic continues to reveal itself.  Today I’ve been thinking about how a single cue can set off a cascade of actions. Specifically, when my yoga teacher tells me to draw the tip of my tailbone down, a zillion other things happen: the kink in my lumbar spine releases, drawing my shoulders together and my upper spine into verticality, which in turn centers my head over my shoulders—in a semblance of good posture. It's like a Jacob’s ladder—that ribbon-and-wood toy where you