Going to the mat -2

The floor was cold. When it's not much more than me and a couple of dogs I turn the gas heat down to under 60 and we get by on small, electric heaters for single rooms, but in the early morning, the heat was still down. The wood felt like polished ice and I could feel the lingering chill of the night coming up through the soles of my feet.

As the dogs watched, I turned on the television and then laid the purple mat out before it, as if I'd come to pray before it. I don't have cable. Fat chance of that.

The mat, at least, was some insulation against the cold floor. I stepped on, took the remote from off the coffee table and selected an instructional video from the list of saved yoga videos.

There were quite a few. Back when I'd decided I was going to practice yoga at home, I went on kind of a binge. I must have stacked a dozen different videos onto my saved list before deciding to ignore them for a couple of months. There were also some suggestive looking foreign language videos I didn't remember saving that had nothing to do with yoga.

I ignored them and picked out the most basic exercise video on the list, hit the play button and waited for it to run through the trippy, dated opening.

I didn't catch the name of the instructor, but she looked normal, wasn't willowy thin or built like Linda Hamilton in "Terminator 2: Judgement Day;" all ripped muscles and sinews. She looked like someone who probably taught French or Italian at the local high school and did yoga on the side for a few extra bucks.

She was polite, friendly, encouraging, and I felt like an ass.

I got lost trying to slow my breathing to match hers. She seemed to have the lung capacity of a blue whale, and all of the poses matched up with her breathing and the slow rhythm of it. She moved slowly, evenly, while I flailed awkwardly.

The dogs didn't help --particularly, the little one, a Jack Russel terrier mix. She jumped from her chair to attack. Apparently, "downward dog" is threatening and "Sun Salutations" were an invitation to jump on my head.

The poses were very basic, she said, but some of them were well beyond my ability. At one point, she laid back, balanced on her elbows and held her feet in the air. The video instructor, then moved her feet back and forth and showed off more advance poses for when I was ready.

That was going to be awhile.

I flat out couldn't do the thing with my legs and looked like a drunk man trying to breakdance, while a small, white dog licked his face.

That pose ended with a lot of swearing.

But I finished the show. It ran about 20 minutes when you deducted the dumb ass open and the legally required, but seldom appreciated closing credits.

I did it. I figure I'll try it again in a couple of days.

This is still not a weight loss blog.

Going to the mat -1

This is not a weight loss blog.

Over the summer, the city hosted a sunrise yoga program at the park by the river. It sounded nice, like a peaceful way to begin the day, and I had never done yoga before --at least, not a full class.

Long, long ago, back when I lived in another place and was a slightly different person, I swam most mornings at the local community center. It was a good way to clear my head before work and release a lot of pent up tension. At the time, I was a copywriter for a local radio station, poor as a church mouse and my love life was in the toilet.

Swimming was good for me.

Anyway, Lori, a friend from work also went to the community center and told me I needed to come to the kickboxing/aerobics class she taught.

Her exact words: "Bill, if nobody shows up, they won't pay me."

She also suggested that it might be a good place to meet women --young, athletic, flexible women who might be impressed by a the kind of guy who made exercise a priority.

It seemed like a long shot, but I went along with it and was, naturally, the youngest student in the room. Everyone else was retirement age or older, but I had a pretty good time anyway, and it wasn't like I had anything better to do, except sulk in front of the television in my apartment.

With a little encouragement, I became a regular and eventually, Lori and her kickboxing co-teacher began adding yoga to the end of the session, as a kind of cool down.

I didn't know what to make of it and to be honest, yoga didn't seem all that manly. Back then, a dude saying that he wanted to go to a yoga class was like saying you wanted to make sweet, sweaty love to a truck driver --but coal country isn't necessarily known for being progressive.

It was pretty progressive that I was even doing the kickboxing.

Yoga didn't go over so well and the class began to thin out. Eventually, I lost interest, too. I stuck with the swimming until my economic circumstance grew dire enough that I decided to devote my early mornings to delivering newspapers.

That was a pretty miserable six month, but it passed. My life changed and I completely forgot about yoga until I started reading about Buddhism and meditation and did a couple of stories about yoga instructors. Yoga was becoming a thing.

I got interested very slowly. Friends taught it. My boss taught it. Everyone invited me to come to their class, but I never went.

So, using a borrowed mat, I went to the class by the river. While the cars on the overpass droned on, taking their drivers to their early morning offices, and the sky threatened rain, I followed along. I was as graceful as a drunken water buffalo, but I can't deny that I didn't feel both relaxed and energized afterwards.

I wanted to to do it again.

So, I bought a yoga mat online and thought long and hard about doing yoga. I'd find a class. I really would. This would be great for me.

A couple of months passed.

So, maybe it was my schedule. I was too busy (not really) --or too shy. On the mat, I'd felt clumsy next to the mostly lithe bodies around me whose bones were made from pipe cleaners.

I tried checking out a yoga video from the library; kept it for two weeks, returned it unwatched. I repeated the process with the same results.

The yoga mat I bought remained tightly rolled up and propped up against the television stand in my living room.

Finally, I looked for yoga instructional videos on Amazon's streaming service, added a stack of them to my watch list and then pointedly ignored them through the holidays. 
 
 That changed this morning.

Just the two of us

I've never had much use for autographs.

Early in my professional writing career, the part where I first began interviewing famous and sort of famous people, I was told by the creator of "Mountain Stage" to avoid asking for anything.

"It's just bad taste," he said.

Aside from being a little rude, given that I had come to work, it was a kind of an abuse of the access. In over ten years, I've never asked for an autograph. I have a couple, but they were sort of just given reflexively. I ended up with Landau Murphy's signature because he was practicing them on paper towels and left one in my office. I have a picture signed by two actresses given to me by the publicity/marketing guy who was shepherding them around town.

I don't ask for souvenirs, but I have asked for other things. I've asked questions that have nothing to with any article I'm writing. I just wanted answers to things I don't understand and just thought they might know some truth I didn't.

I spoke to Bill Withers the other day. 

I was 12-years-old when I first heard Withers, the guy who wrote, "Lean on me," among others. It was on a drive to Michigan. We drove up at Christmas to visit my grandparents --a little unusual. Typically, we only went north in June, but my grandfather was already sick, had been sick for a while. He'd gotten the cancer diagnosis, I think, the summer before. The grownups sent the kids outside while they discussed what was about to happen.

Under a pear tree, we listened to  Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust."

Thump, thump, thump, another one bites the dust.

It was the first album I ever bought. A late bloomer, as usual, I was just becoming aware of music and my tastes were both very mainstream and, at the time, a little unfortunate.

I remember the drive at Christmas. We drove at night. My sisters and mom slept in back, while I kept my father company. We talked or he talked and we listened to the radio. It was the night that I first fell in love with radio.

In the wee hours, while we passed through Ohio, old radio shows from my father's boyhood came on -- "The Great Gildersleeve," "Fibber McGee and Molly," "Dragnet" -- but before midnight, we drove through West Virginia. The mountains cut up the signal and we kept having to tune for a new station.

Station after station, Bill Withers came on over and over. His song, "Just the two of us," was on the charts and the state must have been proud of him, wildly proud. Sitting in the dark, driving, we must have heard it four times. I loved the song, would sometimes hum it or sing bits of it for years later, but never caught the title or the artist.

I didn't listen much to radio until I was deep into high school and didn't know who that song belonged to until Bill Withers was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.

Speaking with him for a story and then writing about him later, I learned a bit about the man, though he's made a post-career in music as a kind of enigma. He's still kind of a mystery.

Not long after "Just the two of us," Withers quit music --probably a wise move given what was coming. In a world with rap and hip hop, there wasn't going to be much room for guys like him to make new music, but I don't know that he thought much about it when he left.

According to his Wikipedia page, his recording contract ended and even though he was still selling records and still capable of making radio hits, he just quietly stepped away. He took his winnings, and went on with his life.


The first time we spoke, he told me about growing up, about loss and about watching his first television program in the upper floor of a funeral home. It creeped him out.

This last time, I asked him about his stammer --or the one he used to have. I asked because I still have mine. After so many years, it still refuses to be gone and it worries me, still. So many times I have been told that I have a wonderful voice, a warm voice, a great radio voice, and with that voice I used to dream that it might take me somewhere.

But it never has.

If I am rested and careful and cautious, if I'm practiced, I can sound polished and clean. Take away any of those things and I can stumble. My mother used to tell me that I just had too much to say and couldn't get my mouth to say it all.

"Slow down, Bill. Slow down," she'd say.

I still fight to do that, to slow down, to get it to come out right. Most days I do ok, but I've never gotten rid of it, and when my my mouth comes unhinged, I end up feeling dull and stupid: pitiful.

Bill Withers beat his stammer. His voice, so warm and personable, is clear. What he says comes out the way he wants. So, I asked him, "how did you do that?"

He told me his stammer was about conquering fear. He learned he needed to stop worrying so much about what other people thought of him. Fear was something he knew something about. He knew how to beat it.

I told him what my mother used to say. I told him sometimes it feels like I have a lot to say and I can't get it out fast enough.

He said he wasn't that smart and wondered if my stammer might be fear --or arrogance.

"You would be the first," he said. "I've never met anyone with a stammer who was arrogant."

He'd insulted me a little, but I laughed and said, no, I didn't think so and then supposed that I might be.

"My ex-wife said I was arrogant," I told him.


Actually, both of them had. Lots of people had called me arrogant or some variation of it, often.

I've been called pompous, a know-it-all, egotistical and in love with the sound of my own voice. I've been accused of being cocky, smug, and loving to be right more than anything else.

"You think very highly of your own opinion," I was told. "You have to think you're so smart."

Sometimes, I'd been told this while in the heat of arguments. Often, the pronouncement had come lightly, off-handedly, as a matter-of-fact, a truth that needed to be repeated because somehow I'd forgotten.

Before we hung up, I congratulated Bill Withers on his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and thanked him for his time. He doesn't give a lot of interviews. It was a gift that he gave me ten minutes on a day he probably had better things to do.

I'm humble now, but it's not my natural state, obviously.

254.6

This is not a weight loss blog.

I bought a bathroom scale because I wanted something like accountability. Say what you want about eating this way or that, exercising this way or that, muscle mass versus body fat, a bathroom scale is still a pretty good way to get a good idea how things are.

They might not be so good if you're a little heavy or a little light, just a few pounds either way, but if you're way off, if you know you're way off, a bathroom scale is a compass and sexton to help you set a new course.

For almost as long as I can remember, I've been heavy. There are pictures of me when I wasn't. Most of them go back before fifth grade. I'm not sure what happened in middle school, but something. By my memory, I was a pretty healthy kid. I was active. I played soccer in the spring, swam all summer and did basketball in the winter (I practiced, but mostly rode the bench during games).

I walked everywhere.
 
I don't remember my mom suddenly deciding to add heaping helpings of lard to our diet. We seldom ate meals out. There weren't a lot of options in the town where I grew up, anyway --a Pizza Hut, a Dairy Queen, eventually a Hardees.

We ate well, but not particularly rich. 

My father was a health nut, a long distance runner, a track coach and had turned the backyard into a vast garden. He'd have added a couple of sheep or a cow, if my mother had gone along with it.

I don't remember there being a tremendous amount of sugar in the house, no sweetened breakfast cereal and no big bottles of soda. We got ice cream sparingly. It was a treat. We got potato chips every now and again. It was a treat. Candy was mostly available at Halloween and Easter or when we went to Grandma's house.

Across the road, the Santollas, shift workers at the local plant and my family's best friends, their fridge was packed full of the traditional American diet. They had the chips, the potted meat and the Captain Crunch cereal with the crunch berries.

But I was a chubby kid, oily looking, and swelling in my clothes like canned biscuit dough cooking in the back window of an old car.

In high school, at the age of 13 and full of self-loathing, I put myself on a diet. For almost three months, I ate rice once a day, six days a week. I started with two cup of rice, loaded with butter. I switched to soy sauce because it had fewer calories. By the end, I was eating a single cup a-day, flavored with a bouillon cube.

Once a week, I'd eat fish, fruit and a few leafy vegetables.

I started running. It was the only exercise I knew.

By the end of it, I'd lost almost 50 pounds, about a third of my body weight. I'd gone from 150 pounds to 103, but it cost me. I started having hot flashes. Bright spots would appear before my eyes and I'd get dizzy. My hair got thinner. I was starving.

Friends my age, just kids, worried about me. An assistant coach I hadn't seen since football season months before asked if I'd been sick. My mother considered having me committed at a nearby hospital, but then I backed away from it.

I stopped the diet, kept the running up, and slowly regained some of the weight.

I stayed mostly healthy through high school, but quit running after a couple of injuries. I took up weights, which made me feel stronger, more powerful and less concerned about my weight.

By the time I graduated high school, I was approaching 200 pounds --not exactly all lean, but not flabby either.

In college, exercise was replaced by beer, smoking and Sunday morning brunch buffets at the school cafeteria. I tacked on 40 pounds in four years, while at the same time, deciding to give up meat.

I was a vegetarian who ate a lot of cheese and drank like a gunslinger. 

My senior year, I spent several hundred dollars on a professional weight loss plan. It worked. I lost 40 pounds again; dipped down to 190 pounds; did it over the summer; old friends didn't recognize me.

But I was healthy. I felt good, but the weight crept back.

The worst shape I was in was 12 years ago. While writing for Graffiti, I did a story on the local plasma center. I was going to go through the process, sell blood and write about the experience. They turned me away due to high blood pressure. I got it checked out with a doctor, who confirmed it and put me on pills. I went on another diet, started exercising and quit the meds after less than a year.

Success, but again, temporary.

I started getting heavy again about three years or so ago. I like to kid myself and say that part of it is because of the weight lifting, but if so, it's probably a small part. My clothes don't fit me. I feel bloated and can hardly stand to look at myself most days.

So, I bought a scale.  It's about accountability and finding my way back to where I want to be.

This is not a weight loss blog.