It recently came to my attention that I have a body attached to my brain that can be used for all kinds of fun activities, like bicycling, hiking and swimming the English Channel.
I’d forgotten this for many years, since I spend most of my time parked in front of a computer, like I am right now, writing this column.
In fact, until recently, I’d become sort of like one of those cryogenically frozen corpses, where the head has been detached from the late person’s body in the hope that it can someday be thawed back out.
My head remains attached firmly to the rest of me, but you wouldn’t have known it back then, except at feeding time, when I used it to eat lots of foods that were slowly killing me.
This all came to a screeching halt last year, when I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and I decided to make a Major Life Change, after which I became one of those annoying health nuts who won’t shut up.
Nowadays, I voluntarily eat things with names like “nutritional yeast” and “Liquid Aminos,” which are surprisingly tasty.
I’m not sure why foods that are good for you have such unappetizing appellations, but they often do.
I mean, if you called a black-bean-and-tofu patty a “Big Mac Junior,” you could probably get more people to eat it. They might even get through half of it before they realized it wasn’t full of fat, salt or chemicals.
Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I want to talk about kayaking.
Even though I’ve now entered my sixth decade of life, I’ve decided that it’s time to take up some of the many sports that unnerved me in the past.
Meaning, most of them. I spent my entire childhood reading under a tree in our back yard, instead of playing with other kids or learning how to do regular kid-type activities, such as climbing trees, roller skating, playing ball and such.
This meant that I generally avoided the emergency room, but, by the time I was actually forced to interact with other kids during school P.E., I was woefully unskilled.
I could tell my classmates all about the reign of Queen Victoria and the flowering of the British Empire, based on the latest book I’d read, but, surprisingly, it didn’t make me the most popular girl on the playground.
In fact, very few kids picked me for their teams based on my extensive knowledge of the works of Isaac Asimov.
I was a total flop as a tomboy, and so I gave it up as soon as I could, and went back to my first love, reading and writing.
Ultimately that led to a wonderful career I enjoy to this very day, but wasn’t too useful when it was time to strap on a pair of skis. If you ever want to have a career falling down, try skiing. You’ll do just fine.
Over the years, whenever I’ve been forced by circumstances to exert myself, such as being in a group that insisted I participate, I was always the one who fell down the slide backwards and bonked her head, who got tangled in the weeds in the lazy river and had to be rescued, who slid down the trail on her back and landed in a pile of dust, who tripped over her shoelaces in the church sack race.
I went hiking in Baja and had to sit down on a rock, after the sole of my hiking boot peeled off in the middle of nowhere. That might have been OK, except the rock was covered with cholla cactus spines.
Everyone enjoyed watching them being surgically extracted from my rear end. Yep, that’s my life to date.
But nowadays I’ve decided that’s going to change. Even though my kids find it all unspeakably funny.
I recently hired Kellie Morris of Bikeucation to teach me how to ride a bike again — something I never thought I’d do. My teenagers sat out front and videotaped me as I wiped out again and again, forgetting that bicycles have brakes, for instance. I don’t even want to know how many hits they got posting them on social media.
Now, I’m looking around for other active sports I can belatedly join, though I may not tell my kids I”m doing it.
I’m unlikely to take up snowboarding or competitive swimming at this point in my life.
My friend, Steve, who’s around my age, just ran his 117th marathon, so it can be done. But I’ve stopped telling people I’m going to run a half-marathon, because they actually started to believe me. Foolish ones.
But my brother promised last week to get me into a kayak when we go back to Baja next year, and I think that’s one sport I can handle.
You just paddle, right? I’m going to practice a few times to see if I can do it. My kids, of course, have been kayaking since they could hold a paddle.
Can you break a kayak? How hard is it to tip over?
Because if it’s possible to drown in a kayak accident in Newport Back Bay, I have faith that I could do it.
Maybe I should alert the Harbor Patrol that I’ll be out there, just in case.
Contact the writer: mfisher@scng.com or 714-796-7994
