Now Playing: “In the Ghetto,” Elvis Presley 

Word Raccoon thinks she’s my personal trainer now. Spoiler: she tried to bribe me with a bagel I couldn’t even dress with butter or cream cheese. This is how low we’ve sunk, friends.

On Friday, I floated across a parking lot. I was back at the gym: recumbent bike, a few minutes on the elliptical, plus the leg machines for good measure. By the end of the day I felt blissful, grounded, and honestly a little tearful at how good it felt to be moving easily again.

And then came Saturday.

I woke up a little stiff but brushed it off. Took an ibuprofen, drifted back to sleep, and didn’t think much of it. The ache didn’t really hit until later at our local specialty market. I had a cart to lean on, but after chatting too long with a former coworker, I felt it creeping back.

The steroids have officially worn off. 

I did not take this well. At all. 

I still have that appointment with a specialist coming up this week, so possibly I will find out at last what’s going on. 

At least I was able to feel like myself again for a time, which was a beautiful gift, short as it was. And I have been reminded that I push too hard, which is basically my life story, but likely did not help.

A call from another former coworker pulled me a bit out of my mollygrubs. She is dealing with so much more than I am. By comparison, I have nothing to complain about.

And yet.

Word Raccoon usually knows when to step in, and she slid her hand into mine and suggested a short yoga session.

If I haven’t made it clear, I am the most casual yogi in the world. I only do it for mobility. I respect those who make it a discipline, but that’s not my vibe. (So I am not at all a yogi. I just wanted to write it. Because Yogi Bear. I know…)

I resisted because I wanted to read instead. But sometimes the raccoon knows what I need when I don’t.

Except Airplay wasn’t working on my TV. I tried several times, because often it takes several tries. This time? Nope. I took a break. Word Raccoon grabbed the remote from me just in case I got any ideas. As if. 

I told her I was giving up, that I didn’t want to do it anyway, that it wasn’t going to help.

Then we passed through the kitchen.

To add insult to injury, I’m on a two-week self-prescribed dairy elimination diet to see if it helps. Most chocolate is out. Which sucks. I may have to make my own. Sounds fancy, but is actually way easy. 

But it wasn’t chocolate WR spied. She caught a whiff of cinnamon raisin bagels.

“You can have one if you do some yoga,” she coaxed.

First of all, I let her have it. We are no longer part of diet culture. We don’t have to earn food. We are not sea otters at a zoo.

But sometimes we do respond to bribes.

I had even squinted at the label in the store to be sure those bagels were dairy free. So yes, they were legal. But no butter allowed. No cream cheese. Peanut butter it is. 

Back in the living room, I pulled the workout video up on my phone, propped it on some books, and survived. Ten minutes. It was over before I’d barely started. 

How did my hip feel after?

Not perfect, but a little better. I’ll take better, even if I want perfect. I know perfection when I see it, and I can’t help but reach for it.

What did that pesky raccoon have the temerity to offer me afterward? Not the cinnamon raisin bagel she had waved under my nose earlier. No, she smugly handed me a banana instead, as if potassium was the prize I was after.

I mean, it worked. I sighed and just gave in. But still.

And then, because WR is never content, she made me sit down and write. Two poems, though my eyes were tired and my brain too sleepy to revise.

One was about Billy Joel (still needs zhuzhing). He’s back on that oyster boat. Told you I’d put him there. 

The other was “Siren.” Title 100% a place holder. 

The summer that Elvis passed away, my family hopped a Trailways bus from our home in West Virginia to visit my aunt in Indiana. I was seven. (My dad came on the weekend to pick us up when he was off work.) 

Everywhere we went, there was Elvis. On the TV in the bus station. Music on the bus itself. On every radio. Every conversation. 

I knew who Elvis was, for sure. My parents owned the Aloha From Hawaii album, as well as various 45’s, and sometimes there’d be an Elvis movie on during the weekend. My favorite, though, was “In the Ghetto.” A story song. Of course. 

My aunt Bonnie was a huge fan. She talked about him at her pink formica table with the chrome trim in her tiny apartment over the shoe shop on Main Street in the tiny town where she lived. Cigarette between thumb and finger, nails red, black hair up in pink rollers, skin tan. Glamorous as ever.

The town siren blared, startling me.

“That’s just the noon whistle,” she said. “Your uncle will be here soon.” She slid the cigarette into an aluminum McDonald’s ashtray, humming along to “Love Me Tender” as she opened a can of StarKist.

It was my first visit to the town I would one day call home, though obviously I didn’t know that at the time. And one of the things I remember most vividly was that siren.

So imagine my surprise not too long ago when I checked the time at the cafe and realized it was past noon and I hadn’t heard it. Someone there swore it still sounded, but the next day I listened closely. No noon siren.

Sometimes it has been a pain, yes, but now it’s just…gone. 

Word Raccoon, filing her nails, insists she had nothing to do with it. I don’t believe her.

Who could have guessed that the town I first saw at seven years old would become my own home? At the time I thought I was only visiting, but it rooted itself in me. The people have, too. 

Sometimes I slip on my aunt’s colorful bead necklaces or earrings I inherited, and for a moment she’s at that formica table again, cigarette poised, pointing for emphasis, humming Elvis, and I’m that seven-year-old girl looking out that apartment window onto Main Street, agog that someone could live above a business. Where I lived, we couldn’t even see our nearest neighbor. 

Word Raccoon isn’t impressed with my story. She wants me to write something else. Rude.

I rolled my eyes and told her that sometimes the best part of the day is what you don’t write about. 

But fine, you fuzzy darling. I’ll write while you go watch traffic. No wait, that’s my job. You never know who or what might present itself and ask to become a poem. Which it is my heart’s delight to create.

Some sirens don’t sound, though they do unmistakably whistle on by. But if you’re listening carefully, you’ll catch them.