Goines On: Pushing up

Click image for more vignettes

One morning, Goines had a pronounced feeling that death was drawing close. He felt this so strongly that on his walk that morning he did 60 pushups at one go when he reached the electrical box off which he routinely did them.
    He may have felt death’s closer approach even the day before, because he had told Mrs. Goines about managing 50 pushups that morning and felt he might be ready to go for 60. He believed he had actually done 51 on a recent walk, the most he had ever done at one go. And even as a vigorous younger man, he had never, so far as he could remember, done more than 30 at one go. But now, this year, he had often done 40 at one go and sometimes done two or three sets, a couple of times doing more than 100 in a day.
    Walking the quarter mile before the electrical box, he has tried to decide on an apt metaphor for death’s encroachment. Was it a shroud descending over him? A sink hole pulling him under? The feeling seemed more like a shroud, he decided, something at first dimming and then blocking the light, stifling breath – rather like the surgical mask he was wearing as he walked, because the coronavirus danger was still present, to himself and others. (In fact, more and more deaths were being attributed to Covid-19, although Goines didn’t think death’s approaching him now had anything to do with that.)
    What did it have to do with? His age, certainly. He was more than two years older than his father was when he died.
    His brain tumor 24 years ago, always a harbinger hanging over him (that shroud again)? The bodily and neurological results of its surgical removal had accompanied him all of the subsequent years: the upward-gaze palsy that made scrolling up or down lists almost unbearable, the tightness around his eyes that sometimes bordered on excruciation, the stiffness of his neck muscles from scarring where the surgeon had cut through muscle to remove a T-section of the back of his skull to get at his brain....
    Enough! thought Goines...52, 53...60!

Copyright © 2020 by Moristotle