Free Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall Page B

had not smoked so much, by now he would have turned one hundred and fifteen. From the late sixties into the millennium, American living rooms have become smokeless, as well as bars, restaurants, hardware stores, hotel lobbies, cabins, business offices, factory floors, sedans, hospital rooms, pizzerias, sweatshops, town meetings, laboratories, palaces, department stores, supermarkets, barbershops, McDonald’s, beauty parlors, art galleries, bookstores, pharmacies, men’s rooms, corner groceries, women’s rooms, barns except for mine, movie houses, dairies, airports, offices of thoracic surgeons, depots, tearooms, Automats, cafeterias, town halls, Macy’s, gymnasiums, igloos, waiting rooms, museums, newsrooms, classrooms, steel mills, libraries, lecture halls, emergency rooms, auditoriums, parks, Mongolian yurts, beaches, and definitely funeral parlors.

Physical Malfitness
    MY TRAINER, PAMELA SANBORN , works me out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She’s tiny and strong, four foot ten and a hundred pounds of muscle. If she had to, I’m sure she could carry my two hundred pounds slung over her shoulders. For half an hour each session she has me do cardio on the treadmill, squat with five-pound weights, lift tenners over my head and out from my sides, stretch muscles, stand up no hands with a beach ball between my knees, and do push-ups (as it were) standing against a wall. Exercise hurts, as well it might, since by choice and for my pleasure I didn’t do it for eighty years. (Once in my fifties I walked four miles.) Pam is cute and loves to work out. When her marriage ended, she found a new companion on an Internet site called Fitness Singles. At the moment, the two of them are bicycling through Italy.
    When I divorced, I looked for women who lazed around after poetry readings.
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    Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed. Sculptors and painters and musicians live longer than writers, who exercise only their fingers with pen or on a keyboard. Sculptors chisel or weld or mold clay. Painters work standing up. They drink quarts of cognac every night but return to physical activity the next morning. A tuba player holds a weighty object and breathes deeply. Even a harmonica requires more fitness than writing.
    People have tried to encourage my mobility. Jane for years cherished cats. This house is full of Jane’s cat presents from friends—cat night-lights and cat doorstops and cat china dolls. In time she found herself mooning after dogs at the house of a writer friend. When she adopted Gus, Jane (who called me Perkins) invented an excuse: “It will get Perkins off his ass.” Thus for several years I walked fifteen minutes a day. The husband of a friend, who went dog walking with me, swears that I parked the car on a dirt road, let Gus out to walk alone, and whistled him back. Then Jane died of leukemia, the dog’s hindquarters failed, and my hindquarters failed. I sit on my ass all day, writing in longhand, which Kendel types up. Sometimes in a car I would pass Pancake Road, two miles away, and see a man walking his collie, the dog stepping out on his forepaws, two wheels harnessed to his backside. These days I no longer drive past Pancake Road or anywhere. I push wheels ahead of me instead of pulling them behind me like the dog. With my forepaws holding the handles of a four-wheeled roller, my buckling hindquarters slowly shove my carcass forward. I drool as I walk, and now and then I sniff a tree.
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    I have been told that as a baby I crawled up on a kitchen table and devoured a quarter pound of butter. I spewed it out quickly, and mouth-memory has endured in my distaste for yellow milkfat. Because it was so athletic to climb the table, perhaps my misadventure also led to my athletic malfitness. Or maybe it came from my mother Lucy. On the farm as a girl, she didn’t chop trees or hayfields or haul ice from