Day: June 22, 2016

One Leg

One problem with growing older (which some like to call aging, a disgusting term, makes me feel like cheese), is that the manuals regarding this are so poorly written.

For example, I’ve learned through my years of training, practice, and experience, to put my shorts and pants on one leg at a time. Been doing it that way so long, I don’t remember when I started.

But in the last year, I realized that I always put the same leg on first, left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg. And that was causing my left leg problems because it trained a limitation into its motion and strength through this unchanging and repetitive motion. Drawing the garment over the first leg is easier because it begins lower, requiring less combo of bending and stepping.

Discovering this wasn’t an accident. A right hander, I began using my left hand to do routine things a few years ago. It surprised me how challenging it was to use the other hand to do things. Brushing my teeth with my left hand, my right hand stood ready to leap in and save the left hand. Conscious effort was required to lower my right hand and disengage it from the activity. In weird ways, the right hand, normally used, shadowed the left hand’s motions.

Wiping my derriere after my business was amazingly strenuous. My body was built to pivot, angle and balance in certain ways with that act and bucked against the mirroring process I was trying to follow.

These efforts and observations made me more mindful about all my activities and behaviors. I quit taking it for granted how things were done and forced myself to do the opposite with everything I did.

Some were more easily accomplished. In the past few months, as I painted trim and walls in the house, I came to tell my body and mind, treat your left side like it’s your right side. Surprisingly, that’s very effective. It’s like the mind heard the words and somehow rewired itself.

There are exceptions, and putting my clothing on with my right leg first is one of those areas. My left leg, in conjunction with the bending required to offer the pants and shorts to the leg, is troubled by the activity. I definitely have reduced mobility, flexibility and strength in that knee. Thinking about it, I’m not surprised, as I played sports, particularly racquetball, baseball and football for years. Everything was geared toward being right handed. But being aware and mindful about it, I’m addressing it and I’m confident I can make changes.

One leg at a time.

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Her Lady

Five foot eight inches tall, rumored to be white with short dark hair and perpetually wearing sunglasses, the woman behind the Stellar Queen was mysterious.

She was at least eight hundred years old, well-established because she’d lived on the Stellar Queen for that long. Such a long life on one ship leads to rumors….

I lived for fifty years as a child and man on the Stellar Queen, enjoying my second childhood on the ship after I initiated my Do-over, so I was always watching out for her. I was never certain I saw her. There were rumors….

Her appearance was challenging not just because she was rarely seen but also because she practiced genetic designing to shape shift, leading her appearance to often change, even becoming an animal, such as the panther that was claimed to live on the Stellar Queen, or one of the unicorns in the forest. At least, those were were the rumors….

The Stellar Queen was her baby, along with Doctor Jharun Pollux, great-granddaughter of Doctor Jerol Pollux. Doctor Jerol Pollux was the famous discoverer of the dark elements. The elder Doctor Pollux, a funny point to write, was but twenty-four when she made her discoveries a hundred years before her great-granddaughter’s birth. Jharun Pollux and Her Lady were said to be contemporaries in their youth, and struck up a relationship from that era. ‘That era’ was when space exploration and colonization began blossoming, thanks to the dark elements of the elder doctor’s findings, but it was almost three hundred years later that the two women began collaborating on the Stellar Queen’s design and construction.

Most critically for the Stellar Queen, Doctor Pollux incorporated power generators using asteridium, chiridium, and lumenirium. Asteridium was the black element most commonly used in starships for propulsion but Pollux used it with a small lumenirium core to create the artificial sun that graced the Stellar Queen’s bio-dome, rising in the east, and setting in the west.

Chiridium was the more interesting choice for the ship’s power. Chiridium, named for chi, after the life force, is rarer, more difficult to mine and control. Myths related to its name and Doctor Jerol Pollux’s comments about it, can never be put down. As a dark element, some say it’s a dark life force. Both Doctors Pollux laughed about that, but with its AI ship overseer, many inhabitants and visitors thought the Stellar Queen was alive. Majorities of people recounted stories and gave interviews stating that something different was felt as soon as you boarded the ship.

Her Lady never made comments about it that anyone ever recorded. As odd and intriguing as her eight hundred year life aboard the Stellar Queen was, her disappearance without notice when she left was equally intriguing. She only told Rei the baker, famous for his goods from Trudy’s Valley, that she was leaving.

Being the only source, naturally, more rumors arose. One rumor was that one of her shapeshifting processes was disrupted, rendering her a monster that couldn’t be fixed, and that she still lived in secret on the Queen. Others claimed that she had never existed, that she had not created the Stellar Queen, but that it created her because the woman who had begun the project had died before it launched. More quietly, it was suggested that perhaps it wasn’t correct to think of the Stellar Queen as two separate entities, but that they were one, yet another project of the great Doctor Jerol Pollux, and her great-granddaughter.

Imagination can be a wild, untamed creature.

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