Below you’ll find the responses to the Sage Challenge for August 2024.
Entries to the Challenges published previously are found in individual issues of the SouthWest Sage. Public access to the February 2023 to February 2024 issues of the newsletter are on the Sage News page. SWW Members have full access to the Newsletter Archives of issues published from 2004 to 2024.
Go to the Sage Challenge page for details about the current Challenge open to SWW members.
Challenge:
In honor of the Olympics,
write a piece no longer than 1,000 words
that celebrates the performance of the human body in motion.
The Limb of a Cottonwood
By Ed Johnson
The boy first engaged the ghost while ditching class on a spring day when the cottonwoods were in blossom. During recess, he had slipped through a small hole under the elementary school’s chain link fence and scampered down the hill, unnoticed by his fifth-grade teacher, a man who loved the sound of his own voice, but who often neglected what was happening around him.
The ghost, a young man dressed in the dark brown robes of a Franciscan priest, nestled in the embrace of a cottonwood, a limber tree emerging amid a gathering of old trees along the bosque’s creek. With its leaves of light green, it loomed over a portion of the creek where rocks and fallen branches had pooled the water.
The ghost waved.
“Helluva morning, isn’t it?”
“Father? What are you doing up there?”
“Look at this branch! It’s perfect!”
“But you’re supposed to be …”
The ghostly priest shimmied along a lean limb that hovered over the water. The boy thought the branch surely would break.
“Just perfect!” the priest said.
“I thought you were …” the boy said.
“What?”
“They said you were, well …”
“What’d they say?”
“You’re dead. They said you’re dead and that you had …”
“What? That I’d what?”
“You know … Hanged yourself from a tree.”
“What? Why’d I do that?”
As he said this, the priest leaped and the boy gasped. The ghost soared with widespread arms, his motion like that of a giant brown hawk approaching its prey. He splashed elegantly into the creek, barely creating a ripple.
“C’mon,” the priest said. “It’s your turn.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I’d be too scared.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Are you a ghost?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then how are you here?”
“C’mon.”
Under the priest’s guidance, the boy found footing, scrambled up the cottonwood then onto the branch that overlooked the pool of water. The limb bent under the boy’s slight weight and he gripped tighter.
“It’s OK. You’re OK. Slide until you’re over the water, then let go.”
The boy took a deep breath and inched forward. Looking up at a blue sky and then down on the gray water, he exhaled and released his hold. He hung in the air and his lungs seemed to rise into his chest. His cheeks flushed and his body limped as it dropped noisily into the creek still cooled by the morning air.
“Wow!” the boy gushed.
He jumped a couple more times, his body relishing the rush. Then he realized his clothes were soaked and thought of the scolding he would get from his mother. As he hurried to the bank, he noticed something else.
“Why aren’t your robes wet?” the boy asked the priest.
“I don’t know.”
As the heat of summer took over the promise of spring, the boy returned to the creek nearly every day. The priest told him stories of places he’d been — Italy and Africa. He spoke of his favorite saints — Francis who revered all of Earth’s creatures, and Cecilia to whom musicians prayed.
“Will you teach me how to pray?” the boy asked.
“C’mon, let’s jump again.”
As the days passed and their conversations progressed, the boy’s curiosity and courage mounted.
“Why’d you do it?”
The priest knew what the boy was asking and paused for a long time before saying this:
“One day my soul got up and left.”
“Where did it go?”
“To find someone better, I suppose.”
When the new school year came, the boy had a harder time sneaking away. His sixth grade teacher was a stern but fair woman who paddled his backside when he was truant. Still, he sometimes found the punishment worth it.
“I’ll be leaving soon,” the priest told the boy one morning.
“Where will you go?”
“We’ve had some fun, you and I. A day without fun is an affront to the rest of the world. And if I had more to tell you, I’d happily stay. But I don’t. So it’s time to leave this place behind me, to find another reason to believe.”
“When will you go?”
“I don’t have the same concept of time like you do. But soon.”
The next day the boy skipped school only to find the cottonwood without company.
Alone, he climbed the tree, breathed deeply and flung his body, experiencing the plummeting sensation for a final time in what would be a long life. He said goodbye to the ghost who was not there and the tree that was. He realized he’d learn to pray after all — without words — while falling from the limb of a cottonwood.
My Golf Game Grants No Fame
by Kathleen A. Hessler
Stand behind your ball. Before you swing, make sure the ball is aligned correctly to your target area. Do a practice swing. Place your feet shoulder length apart; make sure the ball is in the middle of your stance. Bend your knees, but not too much. Lean over, but only ever so slightly. Look down. When your eyes are on the ball, don’t move your head—until you swing through. Got it! Then you should be turning toward the ball as it flies through the air, rotating your hips. Okay, good practice swing. And so, my golf lessons began.
Are you ready? Slow, steady swing, like a pendulum. If you swing through with a smooth movement, your club will hit the ball—don’t try to hit it. Really?
Golf movements, whether they are full swings, half swings, pitches, chips, or putts are not normal body movements. Especially when you are learning the game in your sixties!
I started golfing during the Covid crisis. For real. I had bought clubs eight years before the virus permeated our world, but then I took a job that required weekly travel. So, I was in travel mode, running from airport to airport instead of walking the golf course and swinging my clubs. Sure, I played the occasional corporate golf tournament scramble, or played nine holes once in a while. I would take a lesson on occasion. But then I wouldn’t have time to practice or play.
When Covid hit, I had the opportunity to make tee times and walk out my back door onto the golf course. I walked with my push cart down the fairways. I took lessons. But the movements of playing golf, the precision of the swing, the placement of my hands and feet, and the rotation of my hips did not feel normal. Oh, my goodness, it was all too much!
It is a difficult game, mentally and physically. The movements are not natural steps we develop as a child when we learn to walk, ride a bike, or swim. I always thought I was an athletic person—biking, hiking, skiing, running—but none of these activities prepared me for the mental and physical demands of golf.
If I would have learned to play golf when I was young, I believe I would perform better. The movements, rotation of the body, swing positions, and the rules of the game would be embedded in my memory. My muscle memory. Even if I hadn’t played for many years, I think it would have been easier to pick it up again.
Many days that first year, and the next, I felt like giving up. I was convinced that I would never learn the gross motor skills, the fine motor skills, and the mental exercises that are important to the game. Yes, many times, I thought this game was not for me and I thought about quitting.
I kept at it though. The sharp, clean sound of the ball hitting the club in the perfect spot and sending the ball where I aimed made my day. Even if it was just one shot that day! It is addictive. The few good shots keep me going.
Golf is a social game. I made some great friends playing golf. We commiserate and celebrate all in a day. We recite, in detail, the good and bad shots while having a drink at the 19th hole—the bar!
While some people may socially converse on the course, I cannot focus if I am talking. I am one of those people who needs quiet. I don’t want to chatter all through the game, or play music. I need to concentrate. I once heard that Tiger Woods’ dad did many things to distract him when he was learning to golf, so that Tiger would be able to perform despite the crowds. He wanted him to be able to ignore the noise and commotion that were sure to disrupt his game. In short, Tiger’s dad wanted him to master the art of focus.
I am not there; nor do I have the illusion I will get there. I maintain a high handicap—which means I hit the ball more often than low handicap golfers while trying to get the ball to the green and in the hole. The lower the score, the better the golfer.
But, I am competitive with other high handicappers and have won a few tournaments. While I take lessons intermittently, I know how much practice it would take to lower my handicap significantly. I am not fully committed to that many hours. I have come to terms with my limits. I enjoy walking the course and maneuvering my new electric cart with my remote, which I seem to have better control over than my ball.
I still work at my body positioning, my swing posture, and bending down to read the greens. As I age, I know body movement and mental exercises are as important to good golf as they are to good health. I will keep moving, keep trying to perfect my body alignment, my hip rotation, and my muscle memory. Maybe I will even get lucky and make a hole-in-one someday!
Turning Into a Pretty Woman Through Water Aerobics
by Carol Kreis
Suddenly, the alarm rings. It has a high pitched sound that goes on and on until I get up and stiffly walk across the room to shut it off. My knees aren’t what they used to be. I’ve been diagnosed with osteoarthritis and bone-on-bone knee joints. I look outside — another nice day. I wonder if I should take the day off from the water aerobics class and relax at home.
However, I put on my bathing suit and a rash guard shirt to protect my skin. It also covers poor-fitting tops on my bathing suits. There’s no time to read more than a few headlines in the newspaper that I pick up on the driveway right before I leave. I double-check everything that I packed the night before for the gym. I throw the bags in my car’s trunk, and I’m off.
When I get to the gym, I park in a handicap spot near the entrance. Sometimes other gym members offer to help me with my bags. I slowly wobble into the building, but I can manage on my own. I may look my 82-years, but once I’m inside the gym I start to feel younger. The attendants at the front desk recognize me and give me two white towels. I make my way to an empty locker in the women’s dressing room. I take off the pants that I put over my swimsuit to feel covered up while outside, and I change from sandals to water shoes.
I leave the dressing area holding a sack of what I will use later in the shower. I have one towel slung over my shoulder. I wonder how cold the pool water is. Other eager water exercise aficionados pass me en route to the big area with a large pool. Enormous windows look out at swimmers heading for outside pool as they walk past shuts, trees and grasses. I notice the sky and the easy. Mountains in the distance.
Holding on to a railing, I slowly walk down several steps and ease my body into the water. I remind myself to lower my shoulders. Otherwise, someone will ask me if I am really that cold. The water isn’t freezing, just in the low 80s. I recognize the regulars in the class. We smile at each other, and I like to chat with several of them until Kerry, our instructor, appears and turns on her boombox. Hearing Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman makes me eager to bounce around to every move. I become a pretty woman.
We start warming up with a mule kick as close as we can get to our rear ends with one leg twenty times while we face toward Kerry, then we face toward mountains, the back wall and the river. Next we switch to using the other leg.
We end up doing vigorous moves such as jumping jacks with our arms overhead. We run in place and hastily head a slight ways toward one end of the pool and then the other. With our arms in the air, I imagine myself as part of an artistic water dance troupe. There’s no move I won’t try. I feel great. My endurance has increased. When I started the class last fall, it was a challenge to keep going for the full hour. Now the hour sometimes seems too short. I want to keep going.
On Saturdays, we have a different instructor, Cara. She’s partial to cowboy tunes. Some I don’t recognize, but they all have a good strong beat. Johnny Cash and Garth Brooks are two of my favorite western singers. She often plays their tunes. We do intervals. She times each exercise, and she explains how certain routines strengthen the core.
We rest for 20 seconds between exercises. She shows us different degrees of difficulty for each position as we go though each move. I like to go for the most difficult level, sometimes with my water shoes sticking up in the air while I move in one direction and then twist to another. Often Cara ends with yoga poses, positions I can do with good balance in the water, including the tree pose on one foot and the warrior pose with an extended leg.
One of the class participants, Shelly, gave me a great idea. She brings a set of styrofoam dumb bells. Although they are light on land, when pushed down in the water, they weigh a lot. I ordered a set and have started adding them to some of the easier routines. My biceps should be getting stronger. I notice they are comfortably sore the day after I use the dumb bells.
When I leave the gym, I feel invigorated. My allergies don’t bother me. After all, I’ve spent an hour inside a large room with a pool. It’s sort of like being inside a vaporizer. I walk out of the gym with my head held high and a big smile on my face. I am ready to head to the market or to a cafe for a to-go order. I feel no aches and pains. All that exercise makes me feel like a new woman, a pretty woman!
R.U.N.?
by Dan Wetmore
I owe much to my father, far from least of which is the run.
It was a gift given subtly enough as to be unrealized by either of us, starting out so obliquely it seemed more a payment from me to him than other way around.
Dad was a hiker, a trekker over landscapes, before ever he laced up boots or met a mountain. He loved it enough to properly court the activity, investing time in preparations to make himself worthy of woods’ offerings.
The running spoke greatest commitment. The man who’d flirted with smoking in his first decade, and deepened that relationship in community with the 1950s, gave up first the Pall Malls and Chesterfields, then the pipe, for a pair of waffle-soled slippers, and circumambulations of an asphalt oval.
And if his boys wanted to hike with him, become equal witness to the wild, we’d have to commit likewise, exercise to the point we could exercise that privilege, accompanying Dad to the track summer nights when sun had quit the field.
My brother, not a fan, once remarked that if hell was the thing you hated most, his personal perdition would be that quarter-mile of cinders in the blackness; Kekule’s serpent of a circuit, endlessly eating its own tail and his energies.
It was a sensory deprivation chamber of sorts, nothing to be seen but a few feet of lane lines disappearing into dark; nor heard but footfalls and the bellows of my father’s breathing beside to assure company; nothing felt but the then-unnatural of exaggerated arm swings, and nascent excitement at what seemed a rite of passage, wonder at the places this literal road-to-nowhere might metaphorically take me someday.
Something about the repetitive motions, and their paucity, resonated, lulling me into meditative calm. Until twelfth and final lap, when I’d ask if I could run ahead to see what I could do. Slowly I’d accelerate until, about halfway down the back stretch, I was moving flat out.
And my legs would disappear.
Nothing below the waist but some buoying zephyr, and levitating in the magic of low-level flight which, heretofore, had always been the stuff of dreams.
Crossing the line, still hovering, I’d feel my feet slowly reappear, as there in the ether they somehow found unseen flagstones the exact shapes and spacings of my soles, to bring at least my body gently back to earth.
In that partial sublimation, I found the sublime, and in it, was found.
The run graduated from “means-to-an-end” to “labor for its own sake”, having discovered a physical enterprise in which size didn’t matter; the primary mettle being tested being mental. In which other people weren’t even necessary—at most, a stopwatch; at minimum, a span to be shorted. The supreme sport; spartan, elemental in its endeavor.
Supreme, because exalting the animal kingdom’s defining trait—locomotion; movement wholly of the body, and solely by the body. In the legged set’s natural environs of terra firma.
And sport, because refined as non-lethal competition; the endeavors of catching, and of not being caught, reprieved of the traditional aftermath of being ended and likely eaten.
The act—pursuit of the purity of Pursuit—became an identity, its deceptively complex simplicity enthralling me…
Doing what anyone could, but so few would.
Playing Cupid to contradictions…
…the greatest & the least—effecting their union by covering longest distance in shortest time;
…the dynamic & the static—seeking most acute individuation from womb of a relatively at-rest world, painting one’s self as single point of forward projection in a landscape’s otherwise still life, racing to be most present in the place by visiting more of its corners;
…reconciling backward & forward motions of limbs kinetically akimbo, to achieve syncopatic simpatico, unaccountably balance those imbalancings and their seemingly cancelling vectors, to effect net gain of travel by a mobile mobile.
Engaging an opponent in my own person, whom I can always and never best, but will remain competitive against for a lifetime, through whatever times of the clock or turns of the card such brings.
Though the hands dealt thus far have been good.
I’ve run the ragged edge of destruction, the pace and pain one can sustain forever, but two-seconds-per-mile faster and you’d blow up; daring the abyss to court its evasion’s bliss.
I’ve stepped into surreal in the golden hour on a country road in mid-summer; six in sync in stride rounding a corner and being thrust into suspension, frozen in frame, since motion is relative and—surrounded by relatives in motion, perfect pantomime—there was no variance, no delta t, as comparative to betray any least velocity.
At times I’ve continued to run—not because I didn’t have any reason to stop—but despite having every reason to.
I’ve hung on to opponents’ heels when I wasn’t uncertain I’d succeed, instead certain I would FAIL. But didn’t. Hoping against hope, giving myself more credit than I gave myself credit for, and winning against the house.
Best accolade bestowed? Eric Liddell’s response, in “Chariots of Fire”, when asked, “Why this?”
“Because when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” Maybe saccharine as read, but unaffected as said. Because who wouldn’t delight at a child’s rapture in a vessel made in one’s image?
So the run. Our unbounded boundings—through days and nights never enough—a striving to outrun the clock, call “Time!” on time. Like the Mako Shark, intuiting that to dally is to die, through motion we seek cessation’s cessation, the eternality we hope as prize at final finish line. Asking, exhorting, with every footfall, “RUN, R-U-N, Are you in? Are you IN?! And if not, why? And if not, when? And if not, then…?”
Our staccato steps, chasing the shadow of their tomorrows, sound the depths of those, by sounding the punctuation of protension—ellipses. And pavement gamely applauds the audacity of the act.
