Point of View: Anima Ain’t So Sana

David Brooks wrote recently about the lack of trust in our society, and how corrosive walling oneself off can be when it comes to the intermingling a thriving democracy requires.

Still, when Sinead FitzGibbon recently said concerning a golf lesson I planned to take that it was “a social game,” I replied — by way of explaining why I hadn’t played it — that I had no friends. (Other than Mary, of course.) But that I did exult in having a great number of acquaintances.

“I do a lot of my socializing at the dump,” I told her.

“Like we used to do at Mass,” she said.

“Yes, I get a lot of story ideas there — I should set up a desk and put up a sign saying, ‘The Quote Doctor Is In.’ ”

“The dump,” she concluded with a smile, “is the new Mass!”

“One does feel a bit righteous while recycling there, sorting out the wheat from the corn.” 

I recalled that her father, who is 86, once said he’d take up golf when he was old. 

“He still hasn’t,” she said.

And her mother, who, she said, was my age, which is to say 76, had “just signed up for a 100K bike ride.”

“And when will you take up tennis?” I said.

“When I’m old,” she said.

If old has to do with feeling weaker, then I am not — at least not at this moment in time. I have Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy to thank for that, or perhaps he and the life force left over from the Antareans’ visit 10,000 years ago. The residuum may be in the fern boles that O’en likes to dig up in our backyard. I won’t know for sure until I jump into the Y’s pool. 

Anima Sana in Corpore Sano. That’s the motto of the ASICS tennis sneakers I wear, though, while my corpore’s sano (for the moment, I say), my anima ain’t so sana. Aside from the question of trusting my fellows, I’m having difficulty trusting myself. Mary has said they ought to have a lost and found container at East Hampton Indoor Tennis just for me. I would say she’s as forgetful as I am, but that observation is skewed by the fact that she has many more things to forget than I do — a cellphone, its charger, rings, airline tickets, checkbooks, passports, other vitally important documents, crucial internet passwords, and the like. So, let’s just say she’s much less forgetful, but loses more things. 

I would say that that’s good news for me, for should I find whatever it is she’s missing, I can add indulgences, as it were, to the pile against the day when — through no fault of my own, of course — I may fall out of grace and be consigned to do all my socializing at the dump.