Saturday, February 11, 2006

 

Go Teams!

I am a Winter Olympics junkie. I’m soooo addicted, that when push comes to puck, I’ll even watch women’s hockey.

It all started back in the 70's. The whole family came down with the flu that winter, one by one by all of them. I held out as long as I could. They were all well by the time I succumbed. It was one of the worst cases of the flu that I have ever had (The worst was in 1961, when I was sick for the entire summer and the only thing anyone could guess was that I had a strain of the virus that killed so many during WWI). During the 70's episode, I was delirious for days. The fever finally started to drop and I recognized that I was not wandering alone in the Mojave, but I was so weak that I could not function even as well as a one-year-old. "They" dragged me out of bed, even though I was still running a fever around 102. They insisted that I had to move or I’d get pneumonia. So I moved–from the bed to the couch in the family room. The TV was on. The Winter Olympics. I was still just south of the border of deliriousness, but even if I hadn’t been, I think I would still have been stunned by the athleticism on that old wobbly TV screen. I’ve never been athletic. My sport has always been spectatoring, so to see the impossible being accomplished so easily by so many, it took what breath I had left away. For those two weeks, I stumbled, bobbed, slid, slalomed, & wove my way to the family room every night. Ice skating, luge, downhill skiing, and, omigodidon’tbelievein, the ski jumping. How do they do that????? Sometimes, I swear it was the Olympics was (were?) only thing that kept me out of the hospital–the anticipation of those miraculous snow and ice sports. The funny thing is, anyone who knows me will tell you that I hate being cold. For me, hell is a frozen wasteland. The mythical fires would be nothing more than a sauna for me if I were mythically sent there. I suppose that is actually one of the reasons I love the Winter Olympics so–the cold is another insurmountable object not only surmounted but embraced by impossibly athletic humans.

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Listening to:

Cyndi Lauper: She’s So Unusual
Various Artists: Singers & Songwriters
Robert Miles: Dreamland
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland
Rod Stewart: Storyteller, disc #4
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Californication

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