Weeping in the gym
'too young to know anything of death'*
Whose bag is it anyway?
A man was holding up the queue to get through the gym turnstile. He invited me to go ahead of him. He said, 'I grabbed my wife's handbag instead of my gym bag and now I can't get in.'
But he wasn’t not going in.
Swimming up and down, I spent many lengths thinking about his problem.
How did he mistake a handbag for a gym bag?
Was his wife at home frantically searching for her handbag while he did bench-presses and pistol squats?
How does a handbag feel like a gym bag in your hand?
When he tossed it into the boot, did he not notice?
Is he right now dabbing his sweaty brow with a tissue from a little plastic pouch of travelling tissues from his wife’s handbag?
Doing what she can-can
One day, I had to share a swimming lane with a woman because the pool was full. We got chatting when we both ended up on one side at the same time.
She’d started swimming because of a foot thing. I’d also taken up swimming again because of a foot thing. We went full old-lady mode and explained our foot things and discussed the possibilities for fixing them. Orthotics? Surgery?
She asked me what I did and I told her. I asked her what she did. She said she was a yoga teacher.
‘I’m seventy six. Had a back brace. A hip replacement. The yoga helps. So does the swimming. But I can’t hike or run anymore. I even used to dance when I was young. I did the can-can!’
I said, ‘And now you do the can’t-can’t.’
She eyed me up, lifted the corner of her mouth, and said: ‘That was very funny.’
Existential dread at the ticket machine
An alarm went off. Then there was an announcement.
‘All staff, attention, please. We have a Code 99. All staff, attention please. We have a Code 99 on the upper floor in the stretching area.’
Staff in branded grey T-shirts emerged from every place and ran to wherever the Code 99 was going down.
In front of me at the parking ticket machine, a man in his seventies, wearing a full-face helmet but on top of his head, was gazing up towards the gallery, which required him to turn my way and gaze over my head.
So I looked towards the gallery too. Some of the grey shirts were kneeling on the floor, a medical bag beside them on the ground, while other grey shirts were milling about. I couldn't see whether someone was being resuscitated.
Helmet man looked from them down to me and said: ‘Why must we suffer so?’
Then he put his ticket in the machine and left.
*Andrew McMillan’s collection of poetry Physical was nominated and selected for various poetry prizes after it was published in 2015. The title of today’s Love Letter is taken from poems of his from the collection. Here is one of the poems:
**Andries Samuel is an architect, artist and poet. His drawings can be ordered and printed anywhere in the world. Let me know if you’d like to see more of his work.
With love,
as always,
Karin
I love Andrew McMillan! I was studying in London at the time this collection came out. I remember the day I bought it: I walked along the street from the bookstore to wherever I was going next, reading because I couldn't put it down. Thank you for this reminder, I might pull out this collection and re-read it today.
And yes please to more Andries Samuel artworks.
Thank you for this piece, Karin. I also have so many gym encounters and this letter reminded me of them –such intimacy with people we "don't really know"
What a poem! I loved reading this, particularly the can’t can’t moment.