I have a good friend. Let’s call him Victor. He gets me into more interesting stuff…. one of the most delightful things about the guy is the way we can be just chatting about anything at all, and suddenly, he’s doing it. My hubby still shakes his head over the time i casually mentioned to Victor, over lunch, and him in his suit and all, that i thought i ought to open a wall in our house….. within minutes, the hammers were flying… but, for the sake of domestic harmony, let’s take instead the lemon pie incident.
One evening last winter, i was sitting round the table just chatting with Victor and another friend. We all like to cook. And somehow, the topic turned to lemon meringue pies, the making thereof from scratch. None of us had a recipe, but all of us were curious. But it was a casual curiosity, right? Talk moved on, we all eventually retired for the evening. Next morning, as expected, Victor showed up at the door with his kids, come to walk with me and mine to school. I was not expecting the lemon meringue pie he triumphantly placed in my hands. And so it goes… to think is to do, to do now, most times, with Victor.
So you can understand that it’s a bit unusual that it took so long between the first time he mentioned it, and the first day we actually went with him to the climbing gym. Read that as evidence of how outside my frame of reference it felt to go to a building dedicated to climbing. I didn’t grow up climbing things, i’m a prairie and bush kinda gal. Add to that, i had a serious back injury several years back, and it’s taken a while to get my moves back in milieu familiar to me, let alone making like a fly on a wall. And if you know me, you can imagine me going into a “gym” at all, ready to cold-shoulder the spandex people who find folk like me hard to resist annoying.
Suffice to say, i did not expect to like it so much.
I was, as feared, feeble and inept. My daughter, aged 5, was herself – very nervous, but determined to figure it out, however slowly and timidly she might progress. Victor’s kids have been climbing since infancy (literally – he built a climbing wall in his living room one winter, to local bemusement). So, there they were, skipping along up the walls like kids – you know, baby goats. But they didn’t make fun of my kid for her lack of skill and confidence; and the three of them had a whale of a time. Which tells you something about them, and also about my friend – he is a kind and lovely teacher, both for us newbies and for his own agile, confident, accomplished kids. That didn’t surprise me.
But i was caught off-guard to find that he himself is astonishingly beautiful on the wall. i don’t mean the obvious, that he is a big, handsome, fit guy. I mean that he flows across the rock in a kind of slow-motion meditative ballet that made me appreciate human motion, the way a great dancer or skater does.
What potential joy do we all resist?
I had all my defenses ready – gyms are full of poseurs. There was not a one in the place. Nobody there wanking on about their brand-name anythings. Nobody preening for sexual display. Okay, to be fair, they might have been, but i was too busy trying not to fall off things to notice, and anyone i did notice was similarly absorbed in dealing, at whatever skill level, with the wall. Or, they were watching others with the kind of frank appreciation that is the best of shared physical passions.
Ah, but to climb things is frivolous. A whole building for climbing things? What are we, kids? Well, no to the first charge. And to the second, yes! What is frivolous about seeking to relate to the most marvelous fact – that we are alive and we can move and breathe and feel? And the gym is just the training ground for the real lover – the mountains. One of the staff i met that day was Anna, hopping around cheerfully on her cast, having broken an ankle in a recent climb. She is just itching to get back up on the rock.
As for the kid thing – well, what, i sometimes wonder, would our corporate, or governmental, world look like, if workers kept up the habit we generally lose after elementary school – go out and swing on something, slide, climb something. Remember that we are alive, and how lucky we are to move; to move in whatever way we are able.
You see, that was the most refreshing thing about the rock gym; the palpable sense that people respect each other, accept each other at whatever level of ability or lack thereof we each bring to the wall. I felt welcome, i felt respected and nurtured and encouraged to be at home. Churches could learn from that. Which reminds me, they didn’t seem a proselytising tribe, either. Take Victor, for example. A man of enthusiasms, quick to act. And yet, he patiently waited many months, for us, his friends, to be willing to check out this interest that so involves him and his kids. And was entirely content to let us go at our own pace. Ready, willing and able to teach, yes; but also there for his own sake, happy to leave us where we’d found a comfort zone and go off at his own rate.
Today, i went a second time. This time, no kids, so i could get to grips with the wall on more focused terms. And lo, i was still fat, middle-aged and stiff. But i had a whale of a time. And at one point, clinging to various hand and footholds like the world’s most self-doubting fly, i overheard two teen boys nearby. Looking at my silver-haired friend, one said, in tones of enthusiastic respect, “Dude, check out the old guy.” “Yeah,” said his buddy, “he can really move.” And i turned my head to see them scrutinising with unabashed keenness, sussing out my friend’s style, trying to see how he did it.
I promptly fell off the wall. And simply lay there grinning to myself, sweaty and covered in chalk. It might never happen, but it might also come to pass that one day, some young climber will say, awestruck, looking at me, “Dude, check out the moves on the old lady.”