Spanx A Lot
I have a confession to make: I am a 53-year-old woman, and I love my body.
Yes, I can hear the collective gasp now. (What? Elizabeth Peavey isn’t a 12-year-old boy?) But, more important, How dare she? Is there no greater affront to Western civilization and capitalism than for a woman, particularly of a certain age, to not loathe the skin she’s in? How else are we to hawk all the nips and tucks and tips and shots and spas and creams and fads? What would Marie and Valerie and that Skinny Bitch girl do for work? And what about all those diet-book, fake-food, reality-show and miracle-cure empires? (Sit your way to a thinner you!) No, body love like mine could send the whole economy into yet another tailspin. And of course the first question would be, Does this tailspin make my butt look fat?
That’s not to say I love everything about my body. Things aren’t as springy as they once were. I wouldn’t mind a little less down in the hip and a little more up in the cup. Maybe a couple extra inches on the inseam to balance out my extra-long torso. Oh yeah, and I have these two toes that look like E.T.’s, especially in summer when I wear intergalactic-green (yes, that’s a shade) nail polish. Does hair count? My hair has always been a disaster, but thank you Terri for this latest sassy cut — that is, if gray hair can be sassy. And then there’s that weird vein in my forehead that pops out when I’m trying to think of le mot juste or when I’m doing my Paul LePage imitation, although the latter requires smoking a carton of Camel straights, so that might have something to do with it.
Yet, despite these glaring flaws (Dear God, how does she live with herself?), I still love my body, and I guess I have since I was a kid.
See, I’ve always been scooty. As the youngest of three sibs, I learned early on the importance of fight then flight. (With two older brothers, you didn’t want to stick around too long after you beam one of them with a Lincoln Log.) Tomboy-dom was quick to follow, but with my own twist: I always took dance class or gymnastics alongside whatever sport I was doing, which produced interesting outcomes like trackrobatics and field hockey ballet. Above all else, however, I was Nature Girl. I spent my entire childhood roaming free outdoors, which is what you do when no one will play with you. When I got older, I liked nothing more than stomping up and down mountains and went so far as to get myself on a Sierra Club backpacking trip in the Rockies when I was in high school just to prove the point. OK, that and also with the hope I would run into my then-crush (must I admit it?) John Denver. You know, like he’d be hanging out at the top of whatever mountain we were cresting. “Oh hi, John Denver. Fancy meeting you here,” I planned on saying, before he swept me off for a little fire in the sky. (Yes, I have always been a dork.)
Ah, but then college came, I stumbled into the writing and traveling life, and I traded in my cleats and hiking boots for the Gitanes and absinthe of café society. As far as I was concerned, the outdoors was for hicks. Exercise was for headband-wearing losers like Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton-John. After gaining and shedding my freshman 15 several times (I attended three schools), my body weight finally settled by the time I graduated. The only weight-loss plan I can recall using was the Just-Got-Dumped diet (Watch the pounds melt away in a pool of gin and tears!), which kept me svelte well into my 30s.
But when I embarked on my freelance career in the mid-‘90s, I needed a little structure to my otherwise aimless days, so I joined the dear old decrepit YMCA, long before its rehab. Back then, there was rarely a staff member in the weight room, where commercial radio blared so loudly I could barely hear Ani DiFranco caterwauling in my Walkman. Occasionally, men who were rooming upstairs would wander down wearing sweatpants and loafers and just sit on one of the benches and stare at you. But the worst part was that the cardio room overlooked the pool, where you’d be subjected to a parade of scantily clad Portlanders, many of whom you’d rather not see stripped down to their dainties. One of these swimmers was famous for making calls at the pay phone in the entryway wrapped in nothing but a hand towel. The time to switch gyms came none too soon.
I next joined a gym called Lifestyles. The italics are mine, but that’s the way you had to say it. Lllllifestyles. Seriously, who names a gym after a condom? I guess the clientele was a bit more upscale — if that’s how you consider the Humvee and housewife crowd. I have a pretty good hunch I was the only non-Republican in the joint, but that didn’t stop me from rolling my eyes and lolling my head and making faces (think Joe Biden in the vice-presidential debate) every time W. appeared on one of the giant TVs that was invariably tuned to Fox. To cope, I’d just crank P.J. Harvey or Tori Amos on my Discman and zone the whole place out.
Until it was time to jump ship once again, and I switched to a gym back in town, where I remain. I still pump iron there, along with the retiree and prep-cook set, but the more I stomped and pedaled to nowhere on those machines, the more ridiculous I felt. I could imagine an alien taking a tour of Earth, looking inside a gym and saying, “So this is where you house your criminals. They must be very evil for all this hard labor. And where does all the energy they’re generating go?”
So, three years ago, I returned to an old friend: Back Cove.
When I first moved to Portland in 1979 and lived near USM, I considered Baxter Boulevard my driveway. When I lived in town in the ‘80s, Back Cove was just a triangle of blue, way out there in the suburbs, viewed from my desk on Deering Street. When I first moved back to Maine in 1990 and had no work and nowhere to live, the trail gave me something to do between couch-surfing gigs. The one thing you don’t want to do when mooching off friends is to be in the way. I’d get up and out early, read the want ads at a picnic table at Fort Williams, then come into town and walk along Back Cove. I seem to recall a sidewalk back then, not a trail. This was before the loop. You had to turn around at Tukeys Bridge, which, if you had nothing to do and nowhere to go all day, could mean a lot of back and forth until you could ring your next doorbell.
Because I’ve always been kind of ferocious about my workouts (it takes a lot of sweat to extinguish all those angstballs), walking never really seemed like exercise to me. Nonetheless, three years ago, I disembarked from those stairways to nowhere and started hoofing it outside. Now, rather than drag my ass to the gym, I can’t wait to get out there — and the wilder the weather, the better.
And it is being outside, especially this time of year — with the wind blowing me sideways, the snow pelting, the sun dazzling — that makes me remember how much I love my body. I love the way my legs feel as they stride under me and how my arms pump and my lungs fill and empty, and how my eyes tear and my head clears. I love the sound of birdsong above and below the roar of traffic. I love knowing exactly how many layers of clothing to wear for each change in the weather. I love that it is exactly one hour from my door, around the trail and back again, even when I have to climb over snowdrifts or dance around dog turds or wade through various pools and ponds and lakes that form in the trail’s saggy spots. I love getting my bike out after its three-month hiatus (any day now) and making that hairpin turn that takes me under Tukeys Bridge and into that first blast of early morning skyline out to sea. I love that I am well and I’m strong and that I have the good sense to be grateful.
So, yes, I suppose if I looked closely enough, I could catalogue any number of flaws and imperfections with my body (“Middle Toe, phone home”), but out in the woods and in the wind the only beauty that matters to me is the magnificence of this machine I’ve been given.
And sorry, Madison Avenue. You can’t package and put a price on that.
Elizabeth Peavey dedicates this column in loving memory of her friend Bob Wilson. Till we raise a glass again, I hope your table is laden and the wine is once more sweet.
