Giving it a whirl

Oct. 18, 2007

Dear Julie,

My mother just turned 80. At her birthday dinner mom flinched when I told the waitress her age. Mom still doesn't want people to know.

For her birthday we went to see "The Rat Pack Live at the Sands," a revue in which singers play Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. It's set at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where the three of them performed in the casino at night while filming "Ocean's Eleven" during the day.

My parents love this kind of entertainment -- a Big Band and crooners in tuxes, some repartee. They grieved when Johnny Carson retired.

I grieved when the Frank Sinatra didn't sing "One for my Baby."

My mother loved Diana Krall until Elvis Costello came along and recorded with her. The dark beauty of "Alison" or "Waiting for the End of the World" is not part of her world.

My mother is convinced she has lived at the best time in history. I don't bring up World War II.

She didn't like it when rock 'n' roll came along. I wore out the grooves on "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There." Maybe that's why my parents still don't like rock 'n' roll.

DC and I watched a new movie called "Across the Universe." The characters sing Beatles songs. It's not a revue. The songs fit the plot in intriguing ways.

I like Sinatra but can't imagine a world without Beatles songs.

Each generation identifies with their own music. Hey Nineteen. She don't remember the Queen of Soul.

My nephew likes a band called Dashboard Confessional. When a niece names five of her favorite bands, I've never heard of any of them.

At what age do we stop listening?

I worry about becoming inflexible, rigid in my tastes.

Physical inflexibility is already with me. Andy, my personal trainer, says 97 percent of the population have more flexibility in their hamstrings than I do. He tested mine by having me sit on the floor with my back against the wall and then bending forward. My forward bend was more of a slight bow.

Andy thinks decades of bowing before a typewriter and a computer have tightened me up. But Andy, who's in his 20s, says he doesn't know any flexible middle-aged men. Supposedly middle-aged women are not inflexible.

I equate inflexibility with resistance, of opposing rather than going with. The question to ask ourselves is, What am I resisting?

Andy has devised a regimen of stretching exercises designed to make my hamstrings and hips more flexible and to increase my rotational power. He would have me becoming a golfing whirling dervish. Rumi, my favorite whirling dervish, might say, "You're looking at the waves but ignoring the Sea."

Whirling dervishes reach for religious ecstasy. They open themselves to the Sea called God that flows through us all.

I think of inflexibility or flexibility as symbols of a deeper reality.

"The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man," Joseph Campbell wrote in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces."

I am open to the idea, promulgated by yogis for thousands of years, that increasing the flexibility in my hamstrings can help me become a more flexible and grounded human being. If I become that human being I will be able to accept that my mother and father will never understand the magic in "I Want To Hold Your Hand."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.