For the past few weeks, I’ve made conscious attempts to strike a new path. To get more exercise and simultaneously expand my horizons, I’ve altered my walking route to include a jaunt along a lovely path in our city’s largest park.
But my lily-livered legs barely adjusted to the additional distance before disaster struck. City workers with a honking big bulldozer and a jumbo-sized dump truck started tearing out the walking path. Within two days, the little asphalt path was reduced to a dirt trail.
So now I’m smack dab in the middle of a new routine and have to adjust to another change. Just how flexible does a fifty-three-year-old woman have to be, I want to know? While we’re on the subject, here are a few other unwelcome changes in my life.
- Mary Kay discontinued my favorite colors of blush, eye shadow, and lip gloss. Not that I use that many cosmetics, since I was an adolescent during the granola crunchy era and spurned make up until my late forties. But when I finally got comfortable with the one-eighty switcheroo, the company up and changed things.
- If what I heard in a recent radio report is true, they’ve changed the Sesame Street theme song which worked perfectly well for forty years. And if Captain Kangaroo is off the air, I don’t want to know that one either.
I’m not sure how much more change I can handle. If I have to become any more flexible, I’m going to need yoga lessons. And if I take yoga, I know I’ll get stuck in the lotus position and spend the rest of my life as a poor imitation of a pretzel. That is simply unacceptable since I’m trying to watch my salt intake.
But if they replace the old walking path with a new one, I promise to leave my comfort zone and try it out, my face scrubbed clean of cosmetics, my iPod blasting the old Sesame Street theme song while I walk. That’s as flexible as I can be, barring the lotus position.
In the meantime, pass the pretzels.
