The Last Weekend of My 53rd Year

Monday is my birthday. 53. I am now just about to the age I started teasing my mother about getting old. I've spent about 2400 weekends (since weekends are not a meaningful concept until you start school) and I have, if I am blessed, maybe 988 weekends left, and roughly 50 weeks of vacation. Provided I stay ambulatory and sentient I'll earn another $570,000, about $10,000 of which I will spend on pizza and hot fudge sundaes. So it will not be a total waste, and the government will not get it all.

Nothing of course is guaranteed. We commit a hundred, maybe 500 acts of faith a day, and the graces and redemptions we are afforded in every breathing moment are innumerable, beginning with the act of breathing itself. On the way home from work I walk through a field just east of the Portland airport, and giant jet planes fly directly overhead, descending to land a couple of three woods behind me. As they approach from behind the big early evening moon they appear to be heading right for me, right for the field I'm walking through, and in fact as they pass over they are no more than a few hundred feet over my stocking-capped noggin. If a pilot miscalculated or a crucial rivet worked loose, there would be no way I could outrun a horrible death. Two or three planes a night pass over during my walk. In 19 more years of walks, who knows? The planes seem almost to brush the street lights on 82nd avenue as they approach the runway. So far every one has landed on its wheels and taxied to safety. But walking under their path is an act of faith, based on the belief that jet planes fly and land where they are supposed to. Yet it's impossible to have absolute faith in a man made machine, isn't it?

But we commit ourselves to unexamined acts of faith every day. Most are rewarded and confirmed. Every time we drive through a green light we are trusting ourselves to the lawfulness and good sense of 20 strangers. We practice a kind of faith when we hand our debit card to the pizza cashier making eight dollars an hour, and another kind when we turn on the nightly news. Occasionally our faith is tested. Right now the entire free world is undergoing a great trial of faith, our faith in the system. Markets are faltering and grave news dominates. Credit tightens. Investments dry up. Businesses fail. Cutbacks and layoffs are announced. Buyouts, bailouts, stimulus plans and investigations are enacted. A husband comes home to his wife with grave news of his own, and it hits home: "Honey, they're shutting down the plant" or "We're going to lose the house." A tent city grows outside Reno. A few years ago two jet planes crashed into a tall building, and now they are landing on our heads. And our faith is like a James Bond martini, shaken, not stirred.

It's clear that we have to have faith in something greater than the wheels of capitalism or buying a new car, because no one can afford one right now. We have to remember the essential things: we are better together than we are apart. We are better hoping than despairing. We are better praying than we are cursing or lashing out in anger. It's clear that the biggest challenge our new President faces is maintaining and restoring our faith in America and the American way of life.

At the same time it encourages me that the retiring President has done such a gracious and noble job of fostering a smooth and effective transition of power. He's put the country before party or partisanship, and I truly believe it is his finest hour, a wise and gracious effort that honors his office. Even the bluest of blue staters has to acknowledge this as an act of patriotism, an expression of the great strength of Democracy. In this George Bush has followed his father's example, and as a citizen I am deeply grateful that he has done so.

After work tonight I went to the gym and exercised, practicing another kind of faith, the faith that exercise was good for me and would improve the quality of my declining years, or least make my drop dead gorgeous wife want to be intimate with me. So far, to my deep and inexpressible joy, it has worked. I finished my routine and on the way out I ran into Randy Price, the hardest working man in fitness, one of the trainers at the gym.

Randy is 44, from Ohio, a clear-eyed dynamo with a chiseled body and a ready smile. I've seen him in the gym at five in morning and nine at night, six and seven days a week, working with clients, stopping by to say hello to a hundred different people, quick with a word of encouragement or to listen to part of a success story. He trains 200 clients a year, from 86-year-old grandmas trying to regain the strength and flexibility to open a jar and walk to a cafe to third basemen trying to break in to big league baseball, and he makes an Olympic effort for every one of them.

You should see the genuine passion in his eyes when he talks about fitness. At 38 he left a job in a bakery to make training a full time career. "I was making good money, about $25 an hour, but I hated it. I worked with these old guys and they were all so sour and defeated, and I thought no way man, I've got to find a better way."

Randy lives in a basement room he rents from one of his clients. He spends thousands of dollars on his own training and education and certification, taking online classes to improve his knowledge of training methods and techniques. He studies under JC Santana of Boca Raton, Florida, a master trainer renown around the country for his innovative philosophy, commanding fees of $250 an hour from some of the top athletes in the country. Santana stresses movement, balance and flexibility, the development of core strength through creative use of dumbbells, balls and combination movements. "Training for performance," it's called. Instead of stressing joints and tendons with heavy weights and machines, Randy follows Santana's guidebook that provides hundreds of intense, focused routines that build strength, coordination and endurance without tearing up the body.

"I can train anybody, people from all walks of life," Randy said. "I can take someone who is totally deconditioned and give them new energy and help them feel good and feel good about how they look. It's a great feeling." The commitment and energy he brings to his work is amazing, whether he is working with a pretty girl or a fat old man like myself.

Randy is a young man with a dream, and this is a country that needs people who are still working for a dream. "There are poor trainers, good trainers and elite trainers, and I want to be an elite trainer. I'm not there yet, but I will be." Top trainers make 80 to $90,000 a year, he says. He studies and works and talks fitness, 75 hours a week, in the gym every day. "I gave up everything. I used to have two cars, $30,000 cars, paid for. Now I take the bus."

I exercise a little every week and I have all through my adult life, because I want to look a little better and feel a little better. I've never taken it all that seriously, never had the desire to be a body builder or a serious fitness buff. I just wanted to feel free to eat more pizza and an occasional hot fudge sundae. My doctor, Dr. Gary Pape, one of the finest and most conscientious men I have ever met, told me once, "Whatever you do, keep moving, stay active. It's when people slow down and get sedentary that the real problems begin, the arthritis and stiffening and deterioration."

I'm not going down his road, but I admire Randy's journey. Here is a man committed to a vision, with a goal and a desire and a plan. We should all be so lucky, and strive to fill our next 1000 weekends with that much hope and purpose.