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A day of false summer last week, 80 degrees in Manhattan, and I headed to my physical therapy appointment to improve my busted left shoulder. The PT establishment is in a deep storefront with workout machines and padded tables along the sides, which brings back miserable memories of high school phy-ed, the chin-up bar and rope climb, the padded mats on the gym floor and the waist-high barrier that we were supposed to take a running dive over and somersault forward. Gymnastics, for me, was public humiliation. I've avoided gyms ever since.
But this is a commercial enterprise, so it's a welcoming place, no chin-ups or diving. The therapists are young and trim, in black workout clothes, friendly, professional, and the clientele is older, all shapes and sizes, fatties, skinnies, the lame and hobbling, wizened geezers, folks in discomfort, complainers. The therapists say, "We're going to get you back to better than ever," and the clients think, "Why did this have to happen to me?"
My left shoulder is stiff and achy and Michaela manipulates it for a while, asking, "Tell me how painful this is, on a scale of one to ten," and then I lie on the table, lifting my left arm twenty times, then resting, then twenty more. Some people I see look as if they were distinguished at some point, execs, Columbia profs, maybe an M.D., but now we are here simply as two-legged creatures trying to recover some basic creaturely skills.
The old gent standing ten feet away in gym pants and T-shirt, I'll bet you, once was a suit-and-tie guy planning marketing objectives and now he is squeezing a rolled-up towel twenty times with his left hand, then twenty with the right. We're all in the same boat. Thanks to simple repetitive exercises over the past two weeks, I can now, with the help of the left arm, pull on my trousers while standing up, which is an important accomplishment for a man. Inability would be a sign that Shady Acres lies ahead, a life of soft food and gin rummy.
PT is a merciful business, the idea of young people helping a man of 83 put on his pants. What does an 83-year-old offer society anyway? He is an alien in the world of influencers. I ought to hire a 10-year-old to help me turn on my TV. I read last week that the average price of a new car now is fifty grand, a fact I'm unable to get my head around. My first car, a gift from my dad, was a used 1956 Ford he gave me in 1960 and he paid $300 for it.
I handed out pamphlets for John F. Kennedy in the fall of 1960, and now we see candidates for public office who walk and talk like Nazis — and attract big crowds. Mr. Kennedy would not recognize Washington today. Some days the news is a nightmare. Some days an old man reads the news and finds himself in a foreign country, which is what I like about Manhattan, it feels like the old America I come from. It feels timeless.
I have an appointment on the East Side and Lenny the doorman at our building dashes out into the street and flings his left arm in the air and emits a piercing two-finger whistle just as a New York doorman should, but it's a lost art. Lenny is from Brazil. They had to go to Brazil to find a man who can do the two-finger whistle that makes a taxi take a sharp U-turn.
"Where'd you learn to do that?" I said.
"I went to school for that."
"Columbia?"
"I'm not from Columbia, I'm from Brazil."
"People are talking about you up and down the West Side."
"I can wait."
He got me an ace cabbie who headed for the East Side, having no patience for sightseers, fearless, enterprising, who pulled up at the doctor's door, and I pressed the buzzer and waited. Pressed it again. And a uniformed man came running up, the doorman from next door, holding out a fistful of twenties.
"You left these in the cab," he said. I took it. The cab was gone. I looked the doorman in the eye: "Your mother said you were a good man and I agree with her."
I tipped him a twenty. He tried to wave it away but I insisted. It's a dark world and good deeds make you want to stick around for a while.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.