Far from the glory of Element CrossFit Ontario Challenge this weekend, I had my own time trial: move my parents into a new house. Their remaining possessions, after years on a 300-acre farm, were scattered all over St. Joe Island, mothballed in the garages and basements of friends.
To that end, Friday found me a beast of burden. My dad (the youngest, by a decade, at 61, of the 'work crew') and I twisted, shoved, swore and sweated in the rain. His buddies stood by, ready to tarp. Former farmers all, their sixty-year-old calluses itched in anticipation of work, but their backs had softened by a few short years of Florida commutes and The Back Nine. Lifetime Labour, downsized to Management. They took out their nervousness on know-how: every tarp was folded just so, ready for the dry-and-pressed ratchet strap. In my usual manner, when one guy (arms resting on the truck bed) said, "It's not heavy, it's just awkward," I commented that I'd heard the same said about him. What followed was a grocery list of complaints: knees, back, hips….sprialing downward to hypertension, diabetes, gout.
To their credit, we moved an entire household in one slow, extremely clean convoy.
On Sunday, I got to enjoy something I haven't done in five years: mowing my own lawn. I love cutting grass. Until now, though, there hasn't been a 'lawn' at our house. The mower was cranky. It hadn't run in several years. It complained until I finally tipped it on its side and, in the rain, started taking it apart with my brother-in-law. The air filter was old and caked (I contemplated pushing it around the yard with my thumb covering the air intake, but knew I'd never live it down.) We fooled with the throttle; we cleaned the plug several times. We shot enough gas into the cylinder to warrant a call from BP. We tried fashioning a DIY gasket out of cork. We scraped out old gas that had turned to varnish. And after a few hours, sputtering and bitching, it ran.
Many times in transit the mower sputtered and almost died. After ten minutes, the motor started to level out. The blades moved faster. Small hiccups in gas supply, which caused the motor to rev low and then high, became less regular. The motor began to purr.
At lunchtime, I commented to Dan that it was running like a top. "Sometimes," he said, "it just needs to WORK for awhile to get fixed."
We get a lot of credit for 'fixing' bodies at Catalyst. With someone's chiropractor or physiotherapist, we put a lot of wheels back in motion. Sometimes, the problem is complicated and technical and requires many textbooks. And sometimes, the glorious machine just needs to work.