Notes From The Gym At The Nursing Home
"Somewhere, Chuck Norris is pissed."
It’s been difficult to get a decent workout in at the nursing home.
Something’s been off in there.
Let me explain.
Through my insurance, I am entitled to a free membership at a participating gym location in my area. On the map, the only one within 30 miles of our house is at this nursing home. I don’t question why it is listed. It is free, and I try to go twice a week.
I showed one of the staff members an insurance card once long ago, and that person just sort of shrugged. I took that to mean that I had been entered into the system, a proud member of the nursing home gym.
The room is filled with a handful of elliptical machines and treadmills, a punching bag and a communal pair of boxing gloves, and several of those All-In-One weight and pulley lifting systems. There’s a rowing machine that, true to form, rocks and rattles as you pantomime the act. It’s being braced against the ground with two 60-lb weights. The Total Gym has been out of commission since Christmas. They haven’t taken it out or gotten it fixed. Its cords are just wrapped around it and tied off.
Somewhere, Chuck Norris is pissed.
Honestly, nothing in here feels safe or necessary to have at a gym in a nursing home, but I’m not complaining because I do not pay for that privilege. My presence here is as pure addendum, a piece of bunk data for some actuarial at the insurance company one day to find and say, “What the hell are we covering this for?”
Technically, the place is a wellness and therapy center.
From their website:
“Reach your fitness goals with our full-service athletic facilities which includes cardiovascular as well as weight-training equipment.”
(For some reason, those words are in bold and italicized on their site.)
As always, I’m biding my time here, in a bizarre room that doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be, aesthetically or otherwise. It’s a doctor’s office, a rehab facility, and a break room for the attending staff.
There’s waiting room artworks on the wall, and those weird framed posters that are meant to elicit inspiration by defining a desirable characteristic, like courage. This one features a golf hole out in the middle of a body of water. It implies that it is a challenge to make it out there.
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it,” we are reminded.
There’s a full kitchen in the corner of the room. It’s got a sink, an oven, and a refrigerator. A potholder is wrapped around the door handle of the fridge. A sign on the cabinet reads: “In a true emergency, contact the staff at the nursing home.”
I pray never to be here during whatever constitutes a true emergency.
The adjoining nursing home is attached through a hallway just behind the refrigerator. Throughout the time that I am in here exercising, people come and go through the hallway: residents, nurses, physical therapists. One time, a very old man in a tweed cap and suit wandered into the gym, tip-toeing around the equipment.
“Can I help you with anything?” I asked, having no qualifications to do absolutely anything for him.
He didn’t respond, just turned away and walked on, back down the hallway where presumably he lived.
He seemed to be looking for something.
Most of the outsiders and non-residents are here because they hurt somewhere.
Knees. Backs. Shoulders. They have been ordered here to wait out their sentences, that tenuous and uniquely American time until they can finally crawl into an MRI machine over at the university hospital.
“It hurts,” they say after decades of farm work, of factory work, of household work, entire lives spent seeking overtime wages and raising kids and being pummeled by life so often and for so long that they never considered that it could be any different. They point to where the pain is strongest.
“Go move that part that hurts for six more weeks,” the insurance company responds on official insurance company letterhead.
“See if it gets any better.”
Today, as I pulled up, a woman walked out of the gym, hopped in and peeled out of the parking lot in a side-by-side, which are street legal around here.
There were two older women, non-residents, on the treadmills when I got inside. One of them was watching a Netflix period drama on her iPad. The other one was deep in the comment section of a YouTube video that was just a static image of an Israeli flag. She was typing up her position while ambling on the treadmill, her two pointer fingers stabbing at the touchscreen.
I was just working on an elliptical, choking for air, with my headphones in, playing nothing. I try to hear the gossip from the resident staff and the physical therapists, the conversations among neighbors and people who once shared the same shift at the Whirlpool plant down the street. You can call me a shameless snoop, a chismoso. I’ve heard it before. But I consider it putting my journalism degree to good use, eavesdropping on people at the nursing home gym.
One of the regulars lives in the building next door. She always wears this knit wool sweater with a ruby red cardinal on it, dress pants, and brown leather slippers. These must be her workout clothes. I’d have confused them for church wear if we weren’t surrounded by dumb bells and second-hand lifting equipment.
She stretches her arms out and gets a few reps in on the leg press machine, a truly harrowing sight, me being the only other attending person in this room. Remember: “true emergency.”
But she’s always fine, and after, she goes to line up in front of the mini-basketball hoop in the corner.
I don’t know why this is considered proper gym equipment, but I’m glad it’s here. Her shooting form is ugly, the ball spins somehow in the opposite direction that it’s supposed to, but I’ll be damned if she doesn’t start draining shots with those miniature basketballs. She has to be approaching 90, and she’s in here absolutely raining jumpers on a mini-hoop.
“Nice shooting,” I say on my way out.
She just looks at me as if she hadn’t realized that I was even there at all.
What I appreciate most about the nursing home gym is that there aren’t many mirrors in it. I don’t much care for seeing myself in the act of exercise. My dad reminds me that I was an athlete once. I burned out my body for so many losing records on various teams in different sports that I find it now to have been insane.
For one thing, it prepared me for this particular timeline.
My guiding health question for the last few years has been this: Exactly how much you are you willing to pedal around on a bicycle?
Last weekend, I hung out with writers and musicians and artists, all so hauntingly talented and intelligent that it was sort of exhausting, its own kind of calisthenics.
In these situations, I still find that I’ve never read enough, listened to enough music, or watched the right movies, despite the fact I’ve spent most of my life doing exactly these things and nothing more. I defaulted to talking about staking out the Bingo hall in town and the spiritual power of gas station donuts.
In my conversational deficiency, I resorted to being the customer service representative that I’ve been training all my life to be. I think it freaked them out, my Midwestern way of saying so very much about so very little.
They appreciated concision. Two of them worked in marketing.
One of the writers, a Navy veteran with the knee to prove it, had traveled across the country, reading from his new book of short stories. He’d brought a kettle bell along with him, hundreds of miles in a cramped car.
It looked like it weighed 700 lbs. He said he got his reps in before his readings, where he performed in a loud, frenetic voice. He’d memorized several of his stories, and he threw his book down towards the end of them, staring straight at the audience for the final lines. It was, in a word, intense.
“He definitely doesn’t work out at a nursing home,” I thought. “And look where it’s gotten him.”
He has a work-from-home job and a dog named Snacks and a book of short stories with his name on the cover.
The name of his book is Hey You Assholes.
Meanwhile, I had to print out the story that I read from a computer at the library.
I had to have the librarian walk me through the multi-step process. A thumb drive was involved. In the end, it cost me 50 cents.
Which, it turns out, is exactly 50 cents more than my gym membership costs.
So, I guess I’m still ahead on that one.
Whoopee.
Thanks as always for being a part of this.
The carnival 🏀 hoop!
honored by the shout out! avery, this is such good writing. next time i'm in iowa, we're working out in the nursing home