Let Me Help You With That...Not!

Turning 62 next month, Carla doesn’t look her age. She does look good in jeans though. Partially that’s due to the fact that she has both good jeans, and good genes. She’s fit, strong, and fast. Unlike her spouse, she never drank, smoked, used illegal substances nor ate an entire turkey and two whole hams at one sitting after smoking appetite enhancers. (He’s a disgusting man.)

These days, if she hasn’t worked at the hospital the night before, she goes to the gym with me in the mornings and runs on the stair machine like the energizer bunny. Her Fitbit reports that on work nights, she logs some 14,000 steps per shift. That’s equivalent to 3.3 miles.

Carla is all go, go, go, until she crashes and sleeps for 12 hours straight. She eats the same way, not hungry, no thanks, not now, maybe later…then it’s 24 hours of Blue Bell Vanilla Chocolate Chip Ice Cream in gallon containers, and seafood.

Some years ago, Carla was queen of her body pump class. Skinny and stronger than the average human. I had been doing my thing in the weight room upstairs, acting all manly and making pig sounds as I threw dumbbells around with disgust. I decided to humor Carla’s invitation to come to one of her “lady’s classes”. No big deal, I thought. Give the little ladies a break.

But it was a big deal, a very big deal. They broke me. Not only was I humiliated in the class itself, whimpering and crying softly in the back, I was pretty much paralyzed for a week. Too sore to move a pinkie.

She just laughed at me, no damn sympathy at all.

At 112 pounds, Carla was getting obnoxious, boasting of her physical prowess, and claiming that she could lift almost anything. I wanted to call her bluff and allowed, insisted really, that she carry anything heavy that needed carrying whenever we were together. Six grocery bags at once while I only carry the car keys. That couch needs to be moved over there? I’ll bet you can do it by yourself. I’ll watch.

It became something of a joke between us.

I had a perfect opportunity to dare her to show her stuff when we went to Home Depot for garden supplies. Heavy bags of top soil and fertilizer, huge bales of peat moss, 40-pound landscape stones. She piled everything up on a flat steel dolly. I ambled along beside, as she muscled it out to our truck.  Passing people on their way in, most gave me dirty looks while Carla pushed the dolly along, red faced and breathing deeply. We laughed, knowing that they probably assumed that either I had just undergone a hernia operation, or more likely, that I was a huge pile of excrement in human form.

When we got to the truck, everything had to be loaded up, manhandled (woman handled) onto the tailgate and pushed back on the flatbed. All big, awkward, heavy stuff. I sat on one side of the tailgate just whistling and looking at the birds, as she wrestled to get each huge thing up and onto the flatbed. Almost every man that was coming or going in that lot, rushed over quickly to help Carla, their wives glaring daggers at me. I’d tell them: “Oh, she’s fine. She can do it. We don’t need help, thanks.” Carla huffing and puffing, both of us hiding our laughter.

It almost came to blows with one guy, he insisted on helping until I told him that I was the husband. I guess he figured it was our business. “Poor woman” he must have thought “why would she stay with a jerk like that?”

He may have a point, Carla could do better, but it has nothing to do with her insistence on loading the truck by herself or my true pleasure in seeing her do it.