When I was a kid, I was not particularly athletic. I was born chubby (ten pounds, six ounces) and stayed chubby for quite a while. I was a bit of a pudge. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but when one of the kids in the neighborhood nicknames you “cork” it’s not because you’re known for your acrobatics on the monkey bars in the park.
At some point, our father installed a pullup bar in the kitchen doorway. He announced, “Every time you go in the kitchen for a snack, you do a pullup. Mickey, if my math is right, you should do a pullup every five minutes.”
He harped on it for quite a while and, at some point, he changed his motivational tactics. “What if you had to do one pullup to save your life? That’s all I’m asking: just do one pullup to save your life.”
Typically, after making that proclamation, he’d rip off ten pullups and then stare at us as he caught his breath.
We brushed it off pretty quickly because we just couldn’t imagine a single pullup saving our life. In the movies we watched in the 70s and 80s, you were way better off with a gun than doing pullups when it came to saving your life.
When I started playing hockey in high school, I built up a bit of strength but still wouldn’t do a pullup until I was in the Air Force Reserve. With them, it was pretty cut and dry: do six or you’re done. So I figured out how to do six.
For a quite a few years—until very recently, in fact—I had the ability to do a pullup or two. Six, in fact.
But now I’m back to where I started, kind of a pudge and unable to lift my weight to save my life.
Nowadays, most of my exercise comes from yard work and pickleball. Not the sort of things that builds massive strength.
I’d love to blame the two months of inactivity due to surgery this past summer, but really it’s more of the slow leak of the past five years. Physical exertion lessened. Specific exercises were dropped in favor of “activities.” Then you wake up one day and pull a muscle getting out of bed.
I probably justified each of those itty-bitty shifts away from intense exercise with self-affirming comforts. Walks have taken the place of runs, yoga has taken the place of weight-lifting in the gym.
I’m mostly okay with it. Pickleball is a blast and I’m happy to make that my primary exertion. Yoga is a joy that I don’t want to lose. However, one thing about pullups still haunts me.
My parents took me to the movie The Poseidon Adventure in the 70s. I was traumatized by the destruction and carnage, and ran out into the lobby crying hysterically. My mother eventually comforted me and got me back in the seats to watch the rest of the movie.
Gene Hackman’s climactic finish involves his heroic effort to turn off a steam valve. He jumps from the catwalk to the valve, dangling sixty feet above the ceiling below him as the water keeps rising in the inverted ship. It takes him a minute to shut off the valve and then he hangs there, holding onto the valve.
As Hackman considers his options, his strength fails him and he loses his grip. He plummets and splashes down, his life taken by the fall. As one of the last of the main characters in the movie to die, it’s a painful loss. The others in his party are rescued just a few minutes later.
It’s a somber movie, and we walked out of the theatre in a subdued mood. Revived by the fresh air outside, my father stepped ahead of us and faced us to make an announcement as he pointed back at the movie house. “You realize, if Hackman could have done just a single goddam pullup, he would’ve lived.”
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
The best thing I can report is a guest appearance on the Art Talk podcast hosted by John Cole. We talked about writing, creativity, and fiction.
It’s a tight thirty minutes so I didn’t even get a chance to ask John how many pullups he can do. Still, if you enjoy talking about writing, give a listen.
Upcoming Books and Stuff
If you like crime fiction, I’m looking for advance readers for Ashley Undone.
Set in modern Ann Arbor, Ashley Undone is about a young woman who is so desperate to save her father from the clutches of greed that she destroys his business with a RansomWare attack; but she unleashes her stepmother’s fury, and Ashley must fight to save her father’s life.
If you’re interested in being an advance reader, let me know.
Maybe You’d Like
This week I’ve joined with sci-fi authors to offer some Free Science Fiction:
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/GLiUehW
Next Picayune
I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I plan on talking about politics because politics is how we decide how we live. It effects all of us everyday, like the weather—and we sure love to talk about the weather here in Michigan!
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune.
All the best,
Mickey