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Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Reminiscence

Tomorrow is Thursday. On a Thursday night every week at 5:30pm for many years I used to teach my favourite all-time-ever aerobics class. BODYATTACK. That class was so much a part of me that it must have, at some point, become cellular. Because even now, more than six months from my last class ever, at 5:30pm every Thursday I feel a nagging discomfort, a sense of foreboding... and I have to think, as you do with this kind of generalised anxiety, "What's wrong, what have I forgotten?". Then I remember, I don't teach aerobics any more. In fact I don't even live in Christchurch.
I think one of the hazards of living alone is that this kind of reminiscence can take hold and turn to a deeper reverie. I've got to say it though. I miss teaching aerobics at Les Mills Christchurch. I doubt there will ever again be anything in my life that will match the utter exhilaration I felt every time I, and about 100 others, let out that primal scream that goes with the peak cardio tracks. I still can't listen to the "Real Thing".
As with any extreme experience, you don't remember the tough stuff.. although most people will have seen me asleep at the wheel of my car in total exhaution outside the gym because there's only so much work that one little person can take. I would sometimes wake at night in a cold sweat in overwhelming frustration with the powers that added the limiters to the amplifiers' bass. But even reminding myself of all that. Like a smoker who has given up but can still recall the delicious buzz of their former addiction and wonders if life is not just that little bit less, textured, without it, I miss that thrill of being at the centre of something wonderful.
posted by Christopher Waugh at 11:27 PM
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updoc responded:

Forgive me for bleakening your positive reminiscences. I thought I'd slip in a little poem here for my late father whose ashes were scattered at the forestry school where he taught. May he rest in peace.

Call up the band
> Let the pipers play
> In a distant land
> A son of Scotland has passed away
> Let the drummers beat
> A heartfelt lament
> And may they all complete
> A tuneful monument
> To one held so dear
> A brave and gentle giant without peer
> Let their song ring out far
> Across wide oceans, to heaven and star
> And then proclaim his name
> From brackened glen to windswept plain
> For while we mourn
> And bow our heads and weep
> A new star is born
> Its creator in eternal peaceful sleep
> His mortal life force drained
> His memory, though, forever sustained
> Up on high in the endlessly clattered sky
> His star burns forever fiercely bright
> His love, his humility, his guiding light.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005  

 

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