RESOLUTION - Gardner's Mattress & More...whispers, “Hey there gutty.” Last week I got an email...

RESOLUTION

mynewHEALTH AND BEAUTY? UM, I THINK I GOT THAT UNDER CONTROL

I’m standing in front of my mirror, kind of patting my stomach, when the voice inside my head whispers, “Hey there gutty.”

Last week I got an email from Fine Living Lancaster that said something like, “Want to check out what Lancaster has to offer regarding health and beauty services?” and though my first reaction was: That’s not “for me” per se? standing here in front of the mirror I’m having some doubts. It’s almost another New Years’, I’m thinking the same things I always think around New Years’—that I’m more out of shape than I’ve ever been, and I don’t dress well, and that my back hurts, and that the closets are a mess, and also I need to eat better, and I watch too much TV, and when am I going to find time to work out? and this year I’m going to get serious about the lawn?—and my wife sees me standing here and says, “Forty’s just around the corner!” and I say, “It’s the new thirty!” and throw up a little in my mouth.

Twenty minutes later I write back to Fine Living Lancaster and say, “I’m in. Completely.”

and brightly welcomes everyone in the room and the other fifteen or so women in the room clap and someone says "Woo!" and Jen turns on the stereo and puts her hands on her hips and we put our hands on our hips and she starts shaking her hips and we start shaking our hips and just like that we're doing zumba. We shake our hips and then we shake our hips more and then Jen points to her left leg and everyone in Studio A interprets that signal to mean, “Move to your left.” I take it to mean, “Stand there confused for a second and then get in someone’s way” and that’s exactly what I do.

There's +/- 44 minutes and forty seconds remaining in my first zumba class and it occurs to me there's a very real chance that this will become my operational mode for all 2,684 of those seconds.

DANCE DANCE RESOLUTION

To know something about the way we take care of each other in Lancaster I decide to take a hands-on approach and it’s that hands-on approach that has led me to Studio A at the Universal Athletic Club (www.universalathleticclub.com). Promptly at 8:45am the Lead Zumba Instructor hops up on the stage at the far end of the studio and reads off a few announcements about upcoming Club schedule changes and says something about Les Mills (and under her breath, the women next to me says, "Oh, cool") and then introduces Jen, a brand new zumba instructor who will be running her first class today. Jen is wearing a purple and black zumba outfit, which I recognize as a “zumba outfit” because it says "Zumba!" in purple cursive writing on her right leg. Jen claps her hands

Continued on next page

By Mike Simpson

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Halfway through, the Lead Zumba Instructor hops back on stage and says “Let’s thank Jen!” and everyone says, “Woo!” and she says, “Are you ready to crank it up?” and I think, “No. Seriously, no,” and everyone else says “Woo!” and the LZI shouts, “Well, I’m ready to crank it up?” and she does indeed crank it up. As individual parts of her body move in opposite directions, I stand still in the middle of the room trying to pick up the step and the girl in front of me really gets down and then I pick up the step and the LZI immediately changes the step and I’m standing still in the middle of the room again. We clap our hands. We spin around in circles. In the mirrors – those giant, giant mirrors – I see my form in comparison to the two sixty-year-old women behind me and I don’t much like what I see and neither do they.

I’d like to say I get better; I don’t. But afterward that thing happens when I suddenly feel great and don’t want to leave. The wife and I take a tour of UAC and I feel something I don’t immediately recognize. I want to go for a run, or shoot baskets for a while, or try one of those stair-climbers that have the actual stairs on them, or drink a smoothie with, like, whey protein. There’s a class called, “Sh’bam!” and I say to my wife, “We should do Sh’bam!”

She says, “You don’t even know what that means,” and I don’t. But I’ve done zumba for forty-five minutes and if there was a class called, “Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro” I’d want to take that too.

WHEREIN THE HANDS-ON APPROACH TURNS LITERAL

But instead I go for a manicure.

Though I’m sure time/opportunity are also factors, I’ve never had a manicure before primarily because I’m afraid to get a manicure. Getting a manicure feels like the kind of thing where there is a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do it and the odds seem high that I’ll do whatever it is you aren’t supposed to do and the manicurists will spend the rest of their afternoons crafting jokes at the expense of the Poorly Dressed Tall Guy who soaked his hand wrong or whatever. I express these concerns at length to my manicurist — the incomparably kind Aia Peifley from Luxe Salon (www.

luxelancaster.com) — in a kind of nervous, free-

form monologue that includes a very

detail-heavy catalogue of Things I’ve Knocked Over In Life and she kind of looks at me and smiles and says, “This is

supposed to be relaxing?”

and I tell her I’ve never relaxed in

my entire life ever and she doesn’t look

surprised.

Then she starts.

Oh, then she starts. She starts and I just sit there for twenty minutes while there’s scrubbing, and some soaking, and buffing; the totality of my responsibilities relegated to turning down really generous drink offers every 3-4 minutes and not much else. If there’s any tension at all it’s when Aia scrapes off my cuticular detritus and geez: am I molting?

Continued from previous page

www.FineLivingLancaster.com

NUMBER TWENTY-ONE / $2.95

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Annie Bailey’s Breaks Out the Irish

Published in Fine Living Lancaster Issue Number Twenty-One • February, 2012

Reprinted with permission from Fine Living Lancaster and Virtual Media Group.

All contents of this issue of Fine Living Lancaster are copyrighted by Fine Living Lancaster and Virtual Media Group. All rights reserved.

am I having some kind of sudden-onset-skin-problem? but Aia assures me that the growing pile of scraped-off-skin is “totally normal” and then there’s more buffing and another soak and a serious hand massage and before I know what’s-what I’m in the “relaxation room” across from a couple who are sotto voce talking orange tea pre-couples’ massage. My job is just to sit here and listen to Vaguely Eastern Music and let my nails dry and, yes, relax. About now I realize something about myself: I’ve enjoyed whatever it is that has just happened to me. Enjoyed it an awful lot, in fact. Enough that I consider calling Fine Living Lancaster to see if they want to fund a trip to Plum Salon (www.plumsalonandspa.com) at Urban Place for an hour or two of hot stone therapy and Rooibus tea; or one to Mandarin Rose spa (www.mandarinrosespa.com) for aromatherapy and reflexology and a traditional Thai matt massage and some reiki, and a lap in the pool at the Marriott and a glass of wine to cap it off.

What I’m saying is this. It’s now that I realize: If I’m not relaxed, at the very least I’m whatever the thing is right before you feel relaxed.

WHICH MAKES WHAT I DO THE WORST MEDITATION

Some quick homework, reader. Imagine the first few seconds/minutes you were awake this morning. I mean, the first-first. The alarm goes off, and then what? I know: A number of you, you know, open your eyes and throw off the sheets and sing something real quick because you just need to sing and then you run around the house for awhile and hug your orange juice, etc. That's one end of the People Waking Up In The Morning Continuum. On the other end there's me. I'm 39 and when I wake up there's some moaning/under-the-breath-cursing and about fifteen minutes where I just sit on the edge of the bed and hope against hope that my back might pick this morning as the one where it will straighten itself out.

It’s with that in mind that I find myself in the Dream Room toward the back of Gardner’s Mattress and More and it’s in the Dream Room that owner Ben McClure and I are talking mattresses. The Dream Room is way, way cooler than you’d expect. It’s got a flat screen television and cable and white noise machines and if you’re up for it you can test drive any mattress in the store for up to four hours. If you really want to do some test-driving you can bring pajamas and a book and your partner and FYI: “cuddling is encouraged.” My mattress is old—it has certain geological qualities — and when I tell him this Ben says, “An old mattress takes a big physical toll on your body. Every one of your systems has to work that much more to compensate. When you're sleeping, your body is pumping oxygen-rich blood to all the discs in your back when you're in REM sleep. If you don't get into REM sleep that doesn't happen -- so the correlation could be made that proper spinal health is directly related to a good night's sleep.”

It may or may not be worth mentioning that according to the American Psychological Association (via the National Sleep Foundation) 40 million Americans (or, 14% of all Americans) suffer from at least one of 70 different sleep disorders. At home I sit on my mattress and imagine those twenty or so minutes I’ll spend tomorrow trying to re-orient my spine from another awful night spent on the thing and I imagine the noises I’ll make as I do it and then I spend about thirty minutes fishing around Chiropractic 1st’s awesome website (www.chiropractic-1st.com) for respite. A banner on their website reads, “Body. Mind. Spirit.” I read up on the myths and facts of chiropractic care and sign up for 9 different newsletter topics re: chiropractic health then come upon their spinning 3D





OwnerHighlight

Spine Simulator. The 3D Spine Simulator is a virtual spinal column on which you can highlight specific vertebrae and see, in pulsating form, the organs and nerves affected by that particular vertebrae. C2? That’s the brain, nasal palate, eyes, and sinus. T4? The Liver. L3? The large intestine and bladder. I look at my mattress and I highlight everything from the C1 straight through the sacrum and my virtual nervous system shimmers in virtual damage. I google, “I hate my mattress,” and “spinal damage mattress” and “ten best places in America to light a mattress on fire” and somewhere along the way I come across a quote from the Buddha himself: “Sleep is the best meditation.”

And that’s what I spend the duration of my sleepless, debilitating night thinking about.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF NURSING

In the morning I wake up and moan bedside for +/- 20 minutes and later make my way to Daneen Rund from Bikram Yoga (www.lancasteryoga.com) to talk about maybe giving Bikram a shot. The width and breadth of my Bikram knowledge has come from a visit to the Bikram Yoga website and a conversation with a friend who calls Bikram, “Literally, life-altering.” I want to take Bikram (see: resolution to try new things) but a PE teacher once told me I was “two-by-four flexible” and that’s stuck with me since second grade. Daneen assures me that she came to Bikram a yoga neophyte herself. “I walked right in here, I couldn’t touch my toes. I didn’t know it was hot, I walked in in sweatpants, and I remember the instructor looking at me saying, ‘We don’t normally practice in sweatpants’ and at that time I didn’t know what she meant. The philosophy is: You don’t bend steel when it’s cold, why bend your body when it’s cold? And I walked out of there with more energy than I’d ever felt.” Here she laughs and says, “My first experience,

I remember cancelling painters and painting my entire family room myself because I had so much energy.”

Kismet. Daneen was an RN with a herniated disc looking for non-surgical ways to fix her back. I ask her why she stayed away from surgery and she says, “If you think about it, taking medicine — you usually treat the symptom; you’re not treating the cause. When I herniated my disc they wanted to put me on pain pills, they wanted to put me on anti-inflammatories, and physical therapy. But I don’t want to be on pain meds, that’s just treating the cause — I want someone to treat my spine.”

We stand in the studio and she reminds me it’s a hot yoga and, yes, it’s hot. It’s just the two of us in here and it’s nearly 100 degrees; it gets hotter when there’s another 10-20 students in the place. I get that feeling in my stomach like this isn’t for me/this is too difficult for me/maybe there’s a better place to start/is there a Dummies book for this? and I ask if she ever has true beginners come to a class. She says of course, all the time. “It’s not an easy yoga,” she says. But, “We’re all in here for the same reason. It’s not a gym mentality — I have a lot of athletes, a lot of men who played football or basketball hitting their 40s and they’re realizing ‘Hey I can’t play ball anymore,’ and their growth is great. We’ve gotten people off their blood pressure medicine, their diabetes medicine, anti-anxiety medicine — that to me is true nursing.”





AND THEN A LARGER QUESTION GETS ASKED THAT IS DAUNTING, BUT THRILLING NONETHELESS, AND ISN’T THAT THE BEST KIND OF QUESTION ANYWAY?

That evening I meet Dr. Doug Meints from Thrive! Lancaster (www.thrivelancaster.com) for coffee. In truth I’m not entirely sure what Thrive! does — its website lists chiropractory as one of its many features — but before I can get to one of the four or five historically lame questions I’m prepared to ask him Dr. Meints asks, “What would you like to change about your life?” On the recording of this conversation I: 1. go quiet; and 2. start stuttering a lot. I’m thinking: the length of that list. I’m thinking, I wanted to be a diplomat. I’m thinking, I wanted to be the first veterinarian on the moon. Dr. Meints says, "Most of us are sick of just being average. The person out there who is sick of being average, sick not achieving the dream they had as a kid…they come to us. If the individual thinks they have more potential than they've used and they want to tap into that? That's what we do at Thrive!"

There are a few people in the world for whom “infectious energy” is more apt descriptor than cliché and Dr. Meints is one of those people and as he tells me the story of Thrive! I feel an internal thing happening where I want to get up and just do something. Climb something or fix the car or something. At Thrive! chiropractory is an incredibly small part of a much larger mechanism — Thrive! is a full suite of physiological services from nutrition to fitness to personal development to neuropsychology to networking, all engineered to enable clients to rediscover/discover their best selves. Or, as Dr. Meints says, "We want to take all the stuff you wanted to do as a kid — that you didn't have the time to do or the money to do, and reinvent adulthood.”

In my head I see the hundred or so Big Projects I’ve written down and ignored over the last ten years, and the to-do lists on my computer that don’t interest me. I see myself on the couch, and the bag of Doritos in the pantry. In my head I see a different-myself signing up for a mud run or a marathon or going kickboxing or joining a fight club. Dr. Meints is talking, and as he does I write quickly in my notebook, “New resolution: Reinvent adulthood” and I underline it a lot.

When I get home I say to my wife, “I think I just met the most interesting person in Lancaster” and also, “I need to run a marathon. Need to.”

She wants to know what happened, but I’m downstairs already, throwing out the Doritos.

AND THEN IT HITS YOU

If you talk to enough people in Lancaster you’ll begin to feel it: a kind of internal widening/softening that everyone wants to help everyone and that inputs are everywhere. Aimee Ketchum of Aimee’s Babies (www.aimeesbabies.com) wants to help "babies reach their full potential from birth through the first day of kindergarten" through massage, sensory instructional for parents, DVDs, and even an iPhone app. Dr. Maria Meliton from M2 Pediatric Dentistry (www.pediatricdentist.com) values above all, "The opportunity of seeing the kids grow up. My oldest patients who started coming to me back in the day are now bringing their own children!” I tell Kristin Green at Tangles Salon (www.tangleslancaster.com) that I’m going grey and I don’t like it and also that my wife sometimes calls me “skunky” and she says I can get a new cut and some color and “it would be a cool approach to your new life.” Dr. Alice Cohen (www.randalicentre.com) and I talk wrinkles (my many, many wrinkles) and she tells me that above all else, “I want





my patients to be happy and I do everything that I promote or suggest to my patients because it's important to me.”

If you talk to enough people in Lancaster you get the feeling that there’s a larger project here — to take care of each other — and that we’re all a part of it.

WHAT A HYPOTHETICAL FUTURE COULD LOOK LIKE, IF ALL BREAKS GO MY WAYAt 8:30 in the morning I meet Rosanne Macrina, Manager of Marketing and Public Relations at Willow Valley Retirement Communities (www.willowvalleyretirement.com). Rosanne has offered to show me Willow Valley’s Cultural Center — which is a building the size of a large student union —and talk a little about Willow Valley’s “Mind, Body, Spirit” philosophy. Rosanne says that at Willow Valley, “We believe in ageless thinking — you shouldn’t let age effect the things you do,” and by the looks of things they mean it. The Cultural Center at Willow Valley has a huge indoor pool center, and a full exercise room with weights, and a track, and personal trainers; and a coffee bar; and pool tables; and rooms for People Who Are Really Into Trains; and lecture halls; and an art gallery; and classrooms; and an art studio. We spend half an hour walking around the place and for the most part I say numbskull things like, “This is really amazing,” and Rosanne says much smarter things like, “We believe you should develop yourself at any age as much as you can. And Willow Valley has all things in place here through our amenities, through the staff, through our programming, to make sure that we can support our residents so they have a really fulfilling retirement.” I press her on the Willow Valley “Mind, Body, Spirit” philosophy and she says, “Studies show that if you continue to grow, if you socialize, if you develop yourself, you live longer.”

Here I’m tempted to say something idiotic/patronizing like: “If this is what retirement looks like, then sign me up!” and that’s not at all what I mean to say. What I mean to say here is this: If I’ve learned anything at all this week it’s that I need to work from the inside out. That I need to keep asking certain questions of myself. That it’s easy to read one more magazine, or watch five more minutes of Pardon the Interruption, or check out one more website. That it’s easy to end up thirty- nine years old, and a little self-satisfied, and very soft around the edges.

Rosanne leaves me in the parking lot. This is my final interview for the week and I have the rest of the afternoon to myself and I take a minute and just sit. In my notebook I write, “New resolution: Keep asking questions. Stop, and you end up dead” and I head for home.

POST/END-LUDE

Five nights later my wife and I are sitting on the back porch just before midnight. We’re minutes away from the New Year and soon we’ll see fireworks and the kids down the street will bang pots and pans and someone will set off their car alarm because, why not? and in all directions we’ll hear voices just shouting. All of that soon, but for now it’s nearly midnight and we’re drinking wine and we have a fire and the world is a quieter, better place. It hasn’t been an easy year and we’re both glad to see it pass and we both say as much. She says, “How much time?” and I say, “Ten minutes?” I ask for her resolutions and she asks for mine and then we stop speaking and look at the fire. I think of the past week, I think of the fifteen or so amazing people I’ve been lucky enough to meet, I think of Lancaster, I think of 2012. I think, no more lists. And no more standing in front of the mirror either. It’s a New Year and there’s opportunity everywhere, I think. I resolve only to embrace all of it. s





RESOLUTION - Gardner's Mattress & More...whispers, “Hey there gutty.” Last week I got an email...

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