Heavy Trainers

There is a trainer at my gym . . . been there for years . . . initiated that burdensome, "How’ya doin’" ritual with me some years back . . . I don’t know how it happened, I must have been distracted and looked up as I was walking by him, at precisely the wrong moment . . .

. . . well, he elected not to say hello to me the other night in the locker room . . . instead walked past me and said, "Take it easy, guys" to a couple of young turks who were standing about ten feet away from me . . . probably thought they were "cooler" than me . . . and they didn’t respond to him at all . . . left him hanging . . . and he knew that I knew that they had left him hanging . . . but I didn’t bail him out . . . I didn’t say "Yeah, take it easy, man" . . . I let that humiliating slight of being ignored just linger in the air . . .

I also noticed that he had put on a significant amount of weight. He’s gone to wearing big, floppy sweatshirts, in an unsuccessful attempt to camouflage his burgeoning girth. The heftiness has even affected the way he walks, as he has taken on a waddle in his stride.

And it occurred to me that there might not be another profession in which your appearance immediately bespeaks your incompetence. I thought of a toothless dentist, but that analogy is not really appropriate, since I don’t believe that a dentist can perform corrective services on himself.