Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  It was good advice, but I didn’t know it then. It was tantamount to allowing children in this age to sit in front of a television set or computer all day and fill their minds with fantasies and fiction.

  The real world is out there. The human body needs to move, to spread its wings and stretch out and twist and turn and be challenged.

  By the time I was a high school junior I had pretty much lost all my real sports. I still swam like a demon for as long as I could anytime I was in or near a body of water and I always loved to ride bicycles but there were no organized sports in my life. Also, I was getting chubby. Not fat, but chubby enough to scare my mother into taking me to the doctor to get some diet pills.

  I took a lot of diet pills between the time I was nineteen and the time I fell down a set of stairs when I was thirty-two.

  Fortunately for me and my friends it became very difficult to get diet pills. Doctors would only give you a few at a time.

  Here’s the main thing. Here’s the thing I didn’t know. You cannot stop being even mildly chubby by taking diet pills and trying to starve yourself. The only way you can lose weight is by constant, hard, aerobic exercise and learning to control the sugar and carbohydrates in your diet.

  When I was thirty-two years old my best friend told me that her brother was running. He was a handsome, much-admired man in New Orleans who had given up making money to save the environment. He had been on the cover of Time magazine. We adored him. Even my hardworking lawyer husband adored him. Anything Dick Bambaugh, Junior, decided to do had the rest of us watching and applauding.

  “He’s running,” she repeated. “And he thinks we should too. He thinks we are nuts to keep going on these stupid diets. He said he’d teach us how to run.”

  “Where does he go running?” I asked. “Where does he do it?”

  “He runs on top of the levee,” she answered. “He runs from the power relay station at the end of Carrollton Avenue to Ochsner’s Clinic. It’s a long way. He said all we needed to do was run one mile a day to begin with.”

  “What does he wear?” I asked.

  “Well, he runs in his combat boots and some heavy clothes to make himself sweat but he said we could just run in our tennis clothes.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said go down to the athletic store on Carrollton and tell them we want some running shoes and running socks. Then he said to just go out and put one foot down in front of the other faster than a walk.”

  “I’ll try it,” I said. “I’ll do anything to get this fat off my waist.”

  The next morning, as soon as our children were in school, Bonnie and I went to the store and bought two pairs of boy’s running shoes and put them on and went up on top of the Carrollton Avenue levee and started running. I had watched my brothers run track all my life. I knew what to do. I knew how to run. Every human being knows how to run.

  The first day we managed somehow or other to run about three-fourths of a mile by stopping when we got out of breath. It was an epiphany to me to see how easily I was winded. I knew all about being winded and about how the body makes hemoglobin in the blood to make you stronger if you force it to need hemoglobin.

  “Dick said if we ran from the pumping station to the curve at Maple Street we would have gone a mile,” Bonnie said.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go that far,” I said. It was already clear to both of us that there would be no going back now that we had started. If the famous and admired Dick Bambaugh was running we were running too.

  It was an amazing next couple of months. We ran every day. Sometimes we ran in the rain if it wasn’t falling too hard. We got better shoes. We learned what to wear in different weathers. We started begging people to come and run with us. We dragged my poor hardworking husband away from his papers and made him run. He had rowed single sculls at Exeter and Harvard. He had been an athlete. He took to it as we did.

  I remember the day we ran a mile without stopping as if it were yesterday. Breathless and excited we hugged each other and turned around and started running back.

  I remember the first time I ran six miles, the first time I ran nine miles, the first time I ran eighteen miles ALL THE WAY AROUND THE PARK THREE TIMES AND THEN DOWN TO THE LEVEE AND ALL THE WAY TO OCHSNER’S CLINIC.

  I remember the morning I drove alone to Covington, Louisiana, and ran twenty-six miles across the causeway and won my New Orleans Marathon medal.

  All that time and until now I have never been chubby again. I sometimes gain five or six pounds but I have never stopped running or doing something equally aerobic every day of my life. I am the strongest and most fit seventy-three-year-old in any group of people where I find myself. I don’t need facelifts or tummy tucks. I am a physical human being and every day of my life, with a few hated exceptions, I do something that is the equivalent of running at least three miles.

  Many times in the last few years that means walking very fast on a treadmill raised to the level of a steep hill.

  Exercise is the meat and bread of my existence. The single most important thing I do and the thing on which my mental and physical health depend.

  In all these years, between thirty-two and seventy-three, I have had small pieces of time when I forgot that exercise is the basis of mental and physical health but they are small pieces of time and I always come back to my better angels.

  I want so much to get other people to do this. I know many people have handicaps that keep them from running but there are so many muscles in the body. Remember Dick Bambaugh, my exercise hero. Remember my daddy. Get those children off of those couches and teach them some sports. Get yourself off of those couches and save your lives. I’ll be thinking of you. I’ll be sending you all my best and most aerobic wishes.

  ADDENDA, JANUARY 2015

  I will be eighty years old in February. I still exercise an hour and a half every day and I still love it and I’m still healthy and strong and thinner than I’ve ever been in my life. It gets more difficult to find ways to get out of breath occasionally but I find them. WHATEVER IT TAKES. That’s my motto and my creed. I don’t mind being old but I’m damned if I’m going to become an invalid. Exercise works. And it’s never too late to start.

  Pollen, Part I

  ALLERGY CLINICS ARE TURNING OUT TO BE THE PICKUP BARS OF the nineties. The one to which I go is in a brick building near a junior high school. There is soft Christian music playing in the room where you sign in for your shots. It is early morning. Each person comes in the door and signs his or her name on an extremely small line. Beside most of the names it says SHOT. We are here to be desensitized to our environment. If you view allergy attacks, or being symptomatic, as we call it in the trade, as a full glass of water, then you can imagine desensitization as an attempt to slowly empty the glass. In the end, if all goes well, you will be back where you started, with a nice clean glass shining on your shelf. Your nose will stop running, your eyes will open, and you will be able to get your work done and live and eat and so forth. Yet another victory in the kitchen of life.

  I have come to join this crusade. Every Wednesday I jump out of bed and throw on my clothes and drive down to get my shot. After the sign-in, you wait a short time in the outer office, which more or less resembles the deck of a cruise ship. Instead of the sea you are facing a wall of glass panels behind which the nurses are sorting folders, talking on telephones and moving briskly to the inspirational music. It is eight o’clock in the morning. I am dressed in pale green silk slacks, Birkenstocks with Chanel toenail polish, and a short-sleeved white shirt I ordered from a Lands’ End catalogue.

  I’m a grown woman. I’m not afraid of shots. From the back room a small boy screams. A long, murderous, enraged scream. He screams again. The nurses look down at their work. They have steeled themselves to children’s tantrums. After three weeks I have figured something out. The roll of fat on my upper arms has been there all along for a purpose. The reason I feel no need to scream when I get my shot is that I have this lo
vely roll of passionless fat to absorb the antigens. There is so little nerve tissue in that part of the arm, as any woman knows who has ever tried to exercise it away, that all I feel is a mild soreness. This is almost welcome as it tells me some of the antigens are attempting to escape the fat and make their way into my bloodstream, where, hopefully, my T cells will identify the intruders and mount appropriate defenses, thereby saving the lining of my nose and ears from going into citizen’s arrest and overreacting. So much for science.

  Experience is knowledge and so I have agreed to come down here every Wednesday for a year and stick out my arm and let them inject me with antigens made from seven different kinds of mold and several grasses and ragweed pollen. Fifty-two shots. If this doesn’t work I will have to move to the Virgin Islands and live on a sailboat. As it is, I can’t breathe freely in the place where I live and work, so I have decided it’s worth a shot. Or 52 shots or 104 or 208 shots. I am into this now. I am committed.

  This morning the tune in the outer waiting room is “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” played in ragtime. I could ask them to turn the music down, as I am trying to read Smilla’s Sense of Show by Peter Hoeg and have just gotten to the scary part where Smilla boards the icebreaker bound for Greenland, but I asked them to turn it down last week and I don’t want to turn into a pest. Last week I was reading The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay and was at the part where they wrench the hero from his beloved mammy and ship him off to an Afrikaans boarding school. The reason I love to read books by foreign writers is that they have no sense of political correctness and there are heroes and villains of every age, sex, color, and race and it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad ones. Besides, I am trying to learn how to plot.

  Fortunately there are no long waits in Dr. Hutson’s allergy clinic. She runs this place like IBM. She is not giving any little children or skittish women writers time to change their minds and slip out the door, something I did at a different allergy clinic two years ago. I got all the way to the waiting room, then bolted.

  Within minutes I am called to go down a wide white hall to a small examining room equipped with comfortable chairs and books on hidden food allergies and a cheerful red examining table where I imagine the smaller patients sit to get their shots. A nurse attaches my folder to the door and tells me Dr. Hutson will be there soon. I pick up the food allergy book and begin to read a list of suspect foods. It’s pretty much a list of the things I routinely eat. Milk, eggs, wheat, coffee, chocolate, corn, strawberries, shellfish, peanuts. Lucky for me, I inhale my allergens. I begin to feel very lucky reading that book. What if I were being made sick by all my favorite foods as well as the air I breathe?

  I settle into a meditative state. I see smokestacks from paper mills, the exhaust pipes of automobiles, clear-cut forests, plastics factories, vats of chemicals, the wheat and corn fields of the Midwest, feeding lots for pork, beef, and poultry, all the vast network of farmers and manufacturers who produce the things that make my life a paradise of products, goods and services, Would I go back to living in the woods? Not on your life.

  The door opens and the divine Dr. Hutson enters the room. I love her. I love her pretty blue dress and her crisp white lab coat and her curly white hair and her dedication and her kindness. I have put myself in her hands. “Bring on the shot,” I say. “I can’t wait.”

  A child screams in a far room. Then screams again. “No, no, no, no, no,” he screams.

  “No fat on his upper arm,” I say. “I have a friend who teaches children with learning disabilities. She says 80 percent of them don’t have anything wrong with their brains. They have allergies and can’t think straight for the mucus in their little upper respiratory systems.”

  “I know,” Dr. Hutson says.

  “So does it really hurt them very much, what with no fat?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The imagination is a powerful God.”

  “That it is,” she agrees.

  We proceed to the back half and Dr. Hutson puts my chart in the proper slot and I stick out my arm and the nurse injects me with the antigens. She hands me a kitchen timer and I join my fellow allergy-sufferers in the second waiting room. Each patient has a timer and a book or magazine. It occurs to me that maybe this is all part of a larger scheme to keep the American public literate. As in airplanes and airports, there is nothing to do in this room but read. The chairs are arranged in two concentric circles with plenty of room in between the circles. It seems to be de rigueur to be silent but the brighter-looking patients are checking each other out. There is a well-dressed elderly couple sitting side by side and reading Forbes and Vogue. There is an Indian woman with a child who seems to have Down’s syndrome. She is a really lovely little girl and is standing on her chair watching me. There is a small blond child reading an Easy Reader in hushed tones to her mother and alternately rubbing her arm and whimpering. I sit across from her and pretend to be fascinated by her reading. She suppresses a smile, raises her voice an infinitesimal amount and sits up straighter.

  There is a teenage boy reading Time and a farmer in his work clothes. We are joined by the small boy who was screaming while I talked to the doctor. He is all smiles now, holding his father’s hand and sucking a red lollipop.

  The music is not as loud back here. I settle down with my book. The air conditioner hums. I am on a cruise ship. It is Wednesday morning in the real world and there is work to be done, but not in Dr. Hutson’s back waiting room. All I have to do is read my book and think about the huge breakfast I’m going to buy myself as soon as this is over.

  A handsome man in a blue-and-white polo shirt sits down beside me. He sets his timer near mine and whispers, “This is my first time. How about you?”

  “It’s my third. I think it’s a reasonably sound theory. I think it’s going to cure me.”

  “I’ve read that book. It’s extraordinary, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve read it twice. The British translation and the American translation. They translated it twice. No one knows why. I suppose because the measurements were in the metric system. So what are you in for?”

  “Molds and pollen and dust. How about you?”

  “The same. When this buzzer goes off I’m going down to Pete’s Grill and eat waffles and bacon and scrambled eggs. Come and join me. If this is your first shot, you should celebrate.”

  “Maybe I will. I didn’t have time to eat. I barely got here through the traffic.”

  “Come on over. I want to talk to everyone who’s doing this. I’m obsessed with it. It’s all I think about.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” He smiles a grand, conspiratorial smile at me. This is not sexual. We are just two people deciding to take a chance one morning. Besides, he reminds me of the father of my children, whom I married years ago for his body.

  My buzzer goes off. I take it to the nurse’s station and stick out my arm to have my shot checked. “Is it swollen?” I ask. “Is it red?”

  “To tell the truth I can’t even see where the needle went in,” she answers.

  I go to the checkout desk in the front waiting room. “The Church’s One Foundation” is being played in waltz time by an enthusiastic symphony orchestra. I turn in my chart. I walk out into the bright sunshine and problematic air of the place where I live. I hum a few bars of the hymn the way it is played in Episcopal churches. I strike off in the direction of the restaurant. There is nothing to fear, I tell myself. I am not sick. I have started my shots. There is nothing wrong with me that the genius of my fellow man can’t fix.

  Pollen, Part II

  I HAVE NEVER IMAGINED MYSELF BEING SICK OR ILL. I HAVE always believed I have a huge store of magnificent health stored up against all disaster.

  When I was young I recovered from childhood illnesses with determination and swiftness. Several times in my teenage years I was carried out of my mother’s house on a stretcher with pneumonia caused by sinus infections but I remember nothing about the illnesses until I wa
s being carried down the stairs and put into the ambulances and given the pleasure of imagining the town’s shock as they heard me roaring by. Both of these hospitalizations occurred in a small town in the vicinity of Nashville, Tennessee, where we lived for several years during my father’s pursuit of a million dollars. He made the million dollars, by the way, and spent the rest of his life giving it to charities and other people. He loved giving money away to family and friends and other people. No one ever had to ask. He saw needs and filled them.

  It was many years after those ambulance rides before I had another sinus attack of enough severity to put me to bed. My third husband and I had rented an upstairs apartment on State Street in uptown New Orleans while we renovated a house we had bought. There was a swimming pool beneath our living quarters and I now know this was my first encounter with pernicious mold in housing.

  An ear, nose, and throat doctor cured that sickness by putting some sort of “hot wires” through my sinus cavities and I forgot about upper respiratory problems for awhile. My main memory of that attack is when my cousin returned from China bringing me a glamorous kimono made of royal blue silk. I lent the kimono to a young painter named Ginny Stanford and she painted it on several portrait customers. She grew up to paint a gorgeous official portrait of Hillary Clinton, which hangs in the White House, has portraits in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., and has fulfilled the promise her friends recognized early in her career. I used her paintings of our friends as covers for many of my books.