Can Ginna be believed?  She assures me if I keep to our exercise regimen, eventually, I will look like her.  Personal trainers, especially fit and fabulous trainers who specialize in older adults, may exaggerate to convince their older ladies that sweat and a pounding heart are worth the effort.

Much as I like Ginna, her looks and her powers of persuasion, I don’t like gyms, never have, even classy gyms like the gym in the Jewish Community Center. I was there a couple of times when I had a girl friend. She generously offered me a guest pass. At no cost I could take advantage of JCC cleanliness and order. And I could watch my own TV as I pedaled or ran. No thank you.

I lean more toward people places like the YMCA in the Tenderloin. Briefly I had a personal trainer, but she had a nervous breakdown. I don’t think it was my fault. I did the routines she prescribed without too much resistance and showed her loyalty by walking to the Y on days I didn’t feel well just to say I wouldn’t be there. But once she opted out of training me, I opted out of the Y. It’s a wise woman who knows her limitations. And then the Y shut down temporarily, and I shut down more or less permanently.

But inactivity and lax self care go against my beliefs. As a Unitarian Universalist, I take to heart these words by Henry David Thoreau, “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”

 And as a Buddhist-leaning learner, I might just prefer to sit in meditation. But the Buddha said: “Our body is precious. It is a vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.”

I am in no position to ignore the body-mind-soul connection or to take false refuge in inactivity, which has, as I remember, led to neglect and overeating. 

When I taught weight-loss classes, I promoted exercise, pretty much ordering members to take care of themselves, their bodies, their minds, their spirits, the whole gestalt. And what about me? I couldn’t just be walking to cafes. Not that walking isn’t wonderful. But upper body strength matters too.

So, I ambled across the street and joined a gym in the shopping mall, though unhappy with the blasting rock radio stations – not so much the music as the commercial breaks, and the pounding feet of exercise addicts running at breakneck speeds on treadmills, then pedaling noisily on stationary bikes.

Of course, I paid for a personal trainer, otherwise it would be a no go. My first trainer, an upbeat young man let me lie around a lot if I complained. Then he disappeared. No one at the gym could explain his disappearance. Ginna was his replacement. and I was satisfied. Her body-side manner pleased me, and she practiced a gentle form of coercion.

What really irked me for Ginna’s sake was the money the gym took and the little she got for doing all the work. It didn’t seem right, so I championed her move to independence at Regular Exercise on Clement and 15th. It’s a lovely gym and there she rents time and keeps what she earns as a trainer. We can choose our own music.

Yes, my body, soul and mind approve of working out with Ginna, but sometimes after heaving a ball at the wall, hefting a Viper or crumpling in and out of yoga positions, body, soul and mind are content to walk with Ginna to a coffee shop to sip cappuccinos, compare philosophies and rest comfortably in our companionship. I bet Ginna will agree when I quote Walt Whitman. “If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.”    

If you want contact Ginna go to ginnafit.com.

As she waved me through the security-check gate at SFO, the lady agent pulled up her pant leg to show me the scaled dragon tattoo curling up her calf.  And the other morning a youthful barrista at the West Portal Starbucks took time to explain why he wasn’t sure about getting tattoos though many of his friends had them.  He wondered if it hurt. Of course, it hurts. That’s hardly the point. It’s pain that can be put up with, especially if, like me, you orchestrate your pain to the strains of the ‘Buena Vista Social Club.’

Something about seeing the tattoo of an intricate green vine with pink flowers that looks like a fuchsia and runs from my elbow to my wrist on my right arm of a “woman-of-age” encourages that kind of show and tell. But not everybody, seeing the decorative plant, responds with admiration. Some express indifference, disdain and/or disbelief. Yes, responses have been mixed, but basically they divide between “Wow, what inspired you? And “Good grief, what possessed you?”

My first “good grief” greeted me immediately following my first two and a half hour session, when I came into the lobby of my condo on Gough street with my arm wrapped in plastic. The lady who lives on the floor above me expressed shock and wondered where I planned to park my motorcycle. “I’m the same woman you saw this morning,” I said to her, “and I still have one parking place like every one else in the building.”

My favorite “Good grief” occurred at the opera one evening when the glittery lady sharing the armrest to my right looked at my vine and said, dismissively, that it’s all very well for now, the fad and all but since it is permanent what will you do when you get older. I smiled and pulled up the sleeve on my unadorned left arm.

I’m not sure why I waited 67 years to get ink, perhaps it was the proximity of the tattoo parlor to my home. At some level I reasoned that carting me home if I succumbed to pain or paint fumes wouldn’t be difficult.

But the desire to mindfully decorate and commemorate the right side of my body goes back to being the three-year old whose arm went into the old-style wringer of a washing machine, got stuck and was dreadfully injured, requiring more than a month of hospitalization in traction and skin grafts from my right leg to the arm in the hope they would make the resulting scar less visible.

The tattoo was to be my conscious tribute to childhood pain and perceived ugliness, to the helplessness I felt in the hospital, the awful pain, fear and loneliness. Doctors used to blurt things out in front of children, such as she will never have the full use of the arm. The scars on her leg will never fade, but no one will notice them.

Additionally, I wanted a tribute to plants because as a docent-in-training at the San Francisco Botanical Garden and Arboretum, I learned that plants just do what they do to continue the species, and I admired that unemotional purposiveness. No mood swings in the arboretum as plants coexist without jealousy or vanity. Admirable, don’t you think?

And finally, I chose to make a statement about aging, to say that regardless of what we endured early, life continues full of surprises, and much joy lies in being a late bloomer