Clickety clack. Clickety clack.
Nope, it’s not Laurence and I line-dancing to Southbound Train by Travis Tritt down at our Arizona trailer park.
It’s something almost weirder – me with cleats. Ice cleats to be exact.
I’m not sure how I ended up with cleats in my sock drawer, but there they were the other morning when I was digging for the last pair of decent socks. (Laundry for me is a month-long process – one month to let it pile up, one week to wash it, one week to move it to the dryer, one week letting it sit on the kitchen table, and one week to pack it away. But that’s another story.)
I took notice of these cleats because I had just seen – or rather heard – a lady at the Four Corners mall clickety clacking down the sidewalk. I could not help but look at her feet. She smiled and said, “I’m a tap dancer.” I responded, “Those are cleats right?” And the answer was yes, but she only started wearing them after her second big fall.
I waited a day before wriggling these things onto the soles of my snowboots and then decided not to tempt fate any longer. Clickety clack down the melted driveway, clickety clack across the bare road, and certainly clickety clack, clickety clack down the corridors at my part-time work place.
I would have smiled and said, “I’m a tap dancer,” or “these are ice cleats” – but my bemused onlookers were under the age of 20. What would they know about the good old days of Fred Astaire or Edmund Hillary? Besides, within 10 seconds they were distracted by their “i-whatevers.”
Did the cleats work? Well, I didn’t fall on the way to work or back, or on our dog walk – but neither did my husband who guffaws at the idea of wearing such old-person things. But, I would be careful, if I were him. Tomorrow (March 9) he hits the bit 59 – his last year as a middle-aged man. He’s well and truly a senior come 2013.
Tomorrow we’ll celebrate in our usual way. I’ll have tried to find him a cheap witty card, but have failed. I’ll have already given him his birthday gift, but neither of us will remember what it was. (Was it a coffee pot for the trailer? No, that was his Christmas gift. The Tudors series? No, that was Valentines.)
Then we’ll go out to supper, having forgotten to make reservations. But we’re old people, so we head for supper when other people are still enjoying their dessert from lunch. When we get home, we’ll think of watching a movie, but won’t be able to find “the clicker” so will gladly crawl into bed with a good book that we would never know what page we were at, save for a bookmark.
Would I really subject my husband to line-dancing next time we’re at our desert camp? You betcha. Physical and mental exercise is supposed to help stave off Alzheimer’s disease. And finding our way to the community centre and trying to figure out where to put our feet when will cover both.
And not to be outdone by his cleatin’ wife, he can get heel-toe plates for his cowboy boots and be doing the Arizona Trailer Park Shuffle in two shakes of a rattler’s tail.
What is it T. S. Eliot said? “The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.”
Jan Carrie Steven is a volunteer with Cat Adoption Trust Sudbury (CATS) and the co-ordinator of Small Things: Cats & Books. For more information, go to www.smallthings.ca.
