Berserker


On most Friday mornings, David and I meet up with our good friend and trainer whose name is--wait for it!--Knute Keeling. (Doesn't he just sound like a guy who would kick your ass and laugh while kicking it? He's actually a really sweet guy, but he's also very, very tough and, truly, the best trainer ever.)

Like David and me, he descends from Viking stock and loves to devise new Viking-like ways to torture us into fitness. One of his favorite workouts to inflict on us is called the Berserker. It involves lots of sprinting up stairs, boxing, and push-ups, whilst shouting things like "Victory!" and "Valhalla!!!"

According to Wikipedia, Berserkers (or berserks) were Norse warriors who are reported in the Old Norse literature to have fought in a nearly uncontrollable, trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the English word "berserk." So you get the picture. The potential hurl-factor is high. But every time I make it through the workout, I feel so good. Here's a poem in honor of Fridays with Knute:


Once we were Vikings
but now we're Californians
of a certain age
(not an old age, mind you) and
we fight the evil
hordes known as Time, Gravity,
and, let's face it: Fat.





The Laughing Club


















If you're walking through Heisler Park in Laguna Beach on any given morning, and you're lucky, you might catch a glimpse of the laughter-yoga club, gathered on the beach and doing their thing. I find it a little weird, but delightful. (Incidentally, the August 30 issue of The New Yorker has a profile of Madan Kataria, the originator and guru of the laughter-yoga movement. The accompanying illustration is pretty creepy--I can't explain it--but the article is interesting.)

The laughers gather,
throw their hands up and giggle
guffaw, hoo ha ha!

Awake

Night noises
startle me awake
from un-deep sleep.
I sit up quickly
and time rushes
at, around, over me.
I am swept up,
and hurtle past
days of hide-and-seek
in a musty Michigan basement,
of the sound of cicadas
and lawns being mowed.
Of parched hills and sprawling oaks,
of swim meets and high school crushes
and running on trails
under a blazing blue California sky.
Of fog blanketing a lost coast.
I grasp at these pictures
as if they were roots
growing along the banks of a fast-moving river
but my hands
slip
and I am borne on
and on
and on.

Two Girls in Paris

I just got to reconnect with an old friend, Monique Fayad, whom I met when we were both studying in Paris nearly twenty years ago. Back then she was Monique Ruia from Philadelphia, and when I saw her today, she was just as smart, lovely, and easy to be with as I remembered her to be. In fact, she still looks like she's about 20--which reminds me: I really need to stay out of the sun.

Monique is now married and lives near New York City with her husband and their two children. We got to have lunch today because she and her family are in LA on vacation. Driving home, I remembered a night that the two of us went out dancing and ended up at Les Bains Douches, formerly the site of a bathhouse (reportedly frequented by Marcel Proust, fyi!). If memory serves, at some point they filled the dance floor with soap bubbles....


Two girls in Paris,
out after dark. A swirl of
sangria and jazz.
A boîte. Dancing in a cloud
of soap-bubble foam.
A long walk home. Sunrise in
the city of light.