fat and crabby in Iowa

"If I were back in Iowa," Susan's neighbor tells me, "I would be fat and crabby. All those people do is sit in the house and eat."  Yowser.  I am talking to Jean, seventy something years of age, and she is lamenting the status of her family back in the fair city of Ames, home to a huge cow-loving university.  We are climbing into the car and Susan will drive us to her gym for fifty-five minutes of Silver Sneakers II aerobics.

There are some things I don't like about California such as the governor has an Austrian accent and a wife who shares genetic coding with the notorious Kennedys and that you can never, ever find a parking spot. But I do like the mental and physical conditions of their geriatric population.  Near perfect weather every day inspires the soul to blow fresh chi into aged limbs and locked joints.  I see a little grannies on the boardwalk, silver hair pinned in  top knots,  floral house dresses reminiscent of my Nana and the biggest, whitest Nikes you ever saw.

The class instructor looks forty-five from my position in the back of the class.  She has perfectly toned arms, damn her, and a surfer girl lilt to her voice and she giggles about nothing at all. She is actually sixty years old and just got back from a week swimming in Nicaragua. We go into a squat and she says, don't do this if it hurts and of course, it hurts. If I only did what didn't hurt I would just go home.


It's Sam I am I am.
Would you buy a used car from this Sam?

  Susan has purchased sky-blue denim upholstery for her most recent move back to San Diego. Her pillows have bird-of-paradise and palm tree motif.  "Too much ocean?" she asks,  Naaah, I say, and I luxuriate in the lush pale greens and sea blue turquoise living room. And they always have the biggest TV imaginable and they never watch a program when it is actually on because Jim records shows right inside that big TV and we watch  Sam, the Cooking Guy when we darn well feel like it.  The phone rings and on the corner of the TV screen Jean's name and phone number flashes.   God, I'm loving this.