Understanding Grandpa

I must have been around 10 years old when I came in from outside on the afternoon of a beautiful fall day to find my 60-something Grandpa Dunham sitting at the kitchen table. He was leaned over with exhaustion and dripping with sweat, but he had a very wide smile on his face. He looked at me and said, "I just wanted to know if I could still do it."

Grandpa was prone to somewhat cryptic statements at times, so I sort of shrugged it off and when up to my room, not really understanding what he was referring to. But later in the afternoon I went back outside and saw that the chest high grass of the back field - over an acre in size - had been hand mowed to ankle high and the scythe that my grandfather had used to do it was leaning up against the garage sharp and oiled as new. So, this was what he was referring to. And even though I was 10 years old, I was impressed.

Almost fifty years later, this Saturday -- I bow onto the Aikido mat and start to stretch to warm up. I didn't make a "date" to practice with anyone, so I take the usual luck of the draw for my first class in about 2 years. I find a unsuspecting energetic young man to practice with as we bow to one another and start the first technique of the hour.

My back has kept me from practicing Aikido  for the past two years, but Paul Keelan is teaching this particular morning and this doesn't happen all that often. And the back has been better of late. And I'm wondering if, after two years, I can still do "it."

What "it" is is a little hard to explain. For a martial art, aikido can be pretty delicate. To be able to do it effectively, you have to be able to feel not only what's going on in your own body but in the body of the attacker. The object is to defang the energy of the attack and to do this you have to be able to select the correct response to the attack based almost only solely on feel. But this selection is not calculation. You do what your trained body tells you to do - there's not much intellectual thinking involved. What happens is somewhere between thinking and reacting.

So do I still have "it" after being away for so long?  It seems that I do - much to my own and my partner's amazement.  At least I have as much of "it" as I ever did. And, after a while, a huge grin spreads on my face that reminds me of the one that I saw on Grandpa fifty years before.

Of course, there is payment that must be made for finding out things like this. It's the Tuesday after the Saturday now and I'm just recovering from this little experiment. The back is still tender and I'm just starting to get around without pain. I don't remember seeing Grandpa the day after he mowed the field but he was probably hurting too - what the body learned as a young man was still there, but the price that one pays gets steeper as one gets older. 

But the grin remains.

Comments

[Marshall T. Spriggs]

Thanks, Deb. But I think that it probably was more like, "What the #@$#$@ was that?"

[Debby]

I love this. I bet you gave that young man quite a shock. Maybe he thought if I'm really good I'll be like this guy some day.