Master Moy does the Taoist Tai Chi set

At various times Walhydra has mentioned practicing Taoist Tai Chi.

Now the Taoist Tai Chi Society has posted the following video on YouTube, showing Master Moy Lin-Shin, the founder of TTCS, demonstrating the 108 movement set.

Beautiful!

The guest

Recently, Walhydra has at times heard an indistinct yet somehow familiar voice murmuring in her ear. It has taken her a while to notice enough of a pattern to these occasions to realize that she should be paying attention.

Walhydra hears the voice most clearly during certain interesting moon phases. She also hears it, sometimes, if she makes a particularly satisfying movement or stretch during taoist tai chi chuan.

“Ah. Thank you,” the voice whispers.

“What? Who?”

After over three years of classes and practice, Walhydra’s body has learned to recognize quickly the relaxed and energized templates of full extension and settled, balanced weight—whenever she happens to stumble into them, that is. In fact, Walhydra is now more often able to stumble into them on purpose.

During the rare moments when this happens, Walhydra’s body rediscovers all of its missing parts. In particular, there is the matter of rediscovering her whole right side, from toes to crown.

Though Walhydra is naturally left handed (of course), she has also struggled since her fourth year with muscular and neurological asymmetry on the right, caused by non-paralytic polio. When she is inattentive—in other words, most of the time—Walhydra’s right foot, knee and hip splay outward a bit, throwing her whole frame off balance. To compensate, she has a chronic rightward crick in her neck, and something resembling a skyhook pulling up her left shoulder.

Though these distortions may only be outwardly observable to the trained eye, the gentle reader is left to imagine what fifty-some years of standing and sitting this way must feel like from the inside.

"It's as if I've spent most of my live hunching away from a blow," says Walhydra. "Shield arm raised—rather awkwardly—but sword arm useless."

The voice chuckles at this uncharacteristically warrior-like imagery.

"Huh?" Walhydra grunts, glancing around.

[Note from the amanuensis: It is definitely awkward to raise one's arm mainly with the trapezius rather than the deltoid.]

Back in the spring, Walhydra managed to get through two weekend tai chi intensive workshops. In both, advanced instructors from the USA headquarters concentrated on a few crucial movements, for the sake of deciphering, demonstrating and having students practice the precise angles and articulations which would enhance the health benefits of those efforts.

Walhydra was amazed at the consequences.

A core principle of taoist tai chi is to relax shoulders and lower back, to settle one's weight into one's hips and thighs, and to make one's movements by pushing the floor away and rotating around one's spine with the power of those thigh muscles.

A second core principle is to turn only within the angle between one's line of travel and forty-five degrees, and no farther.

[The various martial schools of tai chi use different principles, yet this approach focuses one's practice on the organic benefits of the movements.]

Two seemingly minor bits of personal coaching during those intensives turned all the lights on for Walhydra.

First, in a movement call a toryu [see image below], one foot is forward, while the back foot is turned out "at the 45."

One moves one's weight alternately between the front and back feet by pushing against the floor, turning, and dropping the weight into the opposite hip. Walhydra tends to wobble whenever she turns her weight onto an angled right foot and hip.

"Put your front foot a step farther forward than you're used to," an instructor hinted.

As odd as this felt, Walhydra tried it. With this small change, she found that the very structure of her skeleton obliged her to turn only forty-five degrees, instead of allowing her to collapse farther backwards.

It was as if her body were suddenly saying, "Oh! You mean that 45!"

Second toryu hint, a different instructor, a second intensive. "When you turn back, when you turn forward, keep your head and chest upright and lead with your heart."

Wow! This was like the lightning bolt of awakening from on high!

In the weeks that followed, Walhydra would get distracted while doing the tai chi set in regular class, because she kept sensing a degree of poise and extension she'd never experienced before.

"I have a right arm!" she exclaimed to her own instructor, only half in jest.

Eventually, she also discovered a right hip and leg. More recently still, she discovered an all-important deep body muscle: the right psoas!

[ For more on Walhydra and the "secret life of the psoas," see this story.]

All of this new awareness doesn't last, though, without conscious attention. In part because Walhydra is so lousy at maintaining any sort of daily practice on her own. Were she to do so, the conscious attention would become body knowledge.

Which brings us back to that voice.

One day, in the midst of some movement or other, Walhydra felt the characteristic popping of joints which comes with unkinking the right side of her neck.

Then her right shoulder and elbow and wrist popped, as she extended that arm. Then the right hip and knee...and all the way down to the bunioned right big toe.

"Oh!" said Walhydra.

And then, "Who's that?" said Walhydra.

Because it felt as if her whole right side had come alive and been fleshed out by...someone.

"You don't remember me?" asked the voice.

"Crippled Wolf! What are you doing there?"

"I live here."

"But...that's part of me."

"Yes."

"But how can you be there?"

"Do the math."

"Um...."

Walhydra puzzled over this one for a bit. She had thought that Crippled Wolf just existed in her mind—or maybe in her imagination.

"Well, yes. But I'm part of our body, too."

"Our?"

"How not?"

"Um..., well...." Walhydra felt very strange for a while, so she went back to concentrating on the tai chi set.

During her next class, Walhydra felt her usual collapsed-ness when dropping the weight into her right hip.

By chance, she straightened her neck again...and Crippled Wolf filled out her right side, directing the weight properly.

"How do you do that?" Walhydra exclaimed.

"You let me, when you straighten your neck."

"But it feels like I'm leaning my head to the left."

"You are. You're straightening your neck to the vertical."

"Oh."

Walhydra felt exhilarated and confounded at the same time.

"But...." She grasped for words. "It's as if someone else is in my right side. Someone I can't feel."

"It's just me."

"But why...?"

"Why do I feel like a phantom? Because you've been pretty much ignoring me for fifty-five years. That's why."

Walhydra shut up for a while.

The next time she wanted to extend her right arm, Walhydra straightened her neck again. And there was Crippled Wolf.

"This is going to take some pondering," she muttered to herself.

Since then, Walhydra's body has been the laboratory for an on-going experiment.

Walking through the reference stacks at work, she will straighten her neck ("pop, crunch") and unfasten her left shoulder from the skyhook ("crunch, pop")

"I'm still here," Crippled Wolf will whisper, as he stretches luxuriously.

Climbing the Main Library's pretentiously named Grand Stairway in the mornings, she will alternately sink her weight into one hip and then the other, each time pushing off with that foot.

"I'm still here."

Best of all, walking sometimes, or even just standing at the reference desk, she will push the floor away with her right root and feel Crippled Wolf rise, bone by bone, tendon by tendon, aligning each joint in turn from that bunioned big toe to the top of her head.

"You see what it's like when you let me be here?"

But Walhydra is understandably puzzled by all of this.

"Where have you been for fifty-five years?" she asks.

"Here."

"Why couldn't I feel you there?"

Crippled Wolf ponders this for a long time.

"Remember that first time we talked, after the werewolf dream?"

"Yeah...?"

"I asked you what you feared about the dream, and you daren't answer my question."

Walhydra's turn to ponder.

"I remember," she murmurs at last.

"I think it's about our believing we weren't allowed to be a 'real' boy."

Walhydra ponders some more.

"Um...what do you mean?"

"What do you remember, with the first little kids you knew, right after the polio?"

"Being happy. They liked me."

"Yeah. I remember that, too. But what do you remember about the new kids after we moved, the year after the polio."

Walhydra frowns.

"Kids laughing at me for spilling tomato juice on myself in kindergarten. Boys teasing me in first grade, because I was lousy at kickball. Being called a sissy."

"Yeah," Crippled Wolf says.

A long silence.

"Do you remember the first boy you had a crush on?" Crippled Wolf's tone is gentle.

Walhydra feels embarrassed. "Jeff, on Lassie."

"Any others?"

"Um...." Walhydra feels more embarrassed. "Spin, on Spin and Marty."

"Why?"

"Just because they were regular boys...I guess. And they were...um...cute."

"Nothing sexual?"

"I was five! Are you kidding?!"

"But not a regular boy. Not a 'real' boy."

Walhydra feels her anger rise.

"Are you saying that's why I'm gay?!"

"No, no!" Crippled Wolf says earnestly. "We've always been gay. I'm just saying that's why you forgot about me. Because they all kept telling you you weren't a real boy."

Walhydra has to sit down. After a long time, her curiosity gets to her.

"Are you gay?"

"I said 'We've always been gay.' Of course I am."

"But you're a real boy?"

"Of course we are! Look between your legs."

"Oh. Well. There is that."

"Dodo!"

"Poopy!"

Startled at hearing herself yell this childhood insult, Walhydra gives a boyish giggle, which Crippled Wolf echoes.

Then she remembers childhood shoving and teasing matches with her younger brother—who never said she wasn't a real boy.

"Yes," says Crippled Wolf. "There's always been that blessing. Our brother—and our sister."

"Yeah," Walhydra says, smiling. "But then...we were all pretty weird kids."

"The best kind."

Walhydra feels a glow. But then she stops short.

"But...," she begins. "But how come you're only coming out now? When I'm almost sixty?"

It hurts to ask this.

"It takes a long time to heal."

"From polio?"

"No. From teasing."

Walhydra sits a long time after this comment.

"Um. How come you call yourself Crippled Wolf?"

"Because we're crippled."

"By teasing?"

"No. By polio."

"But you said 'healing'."

"Yes. I said 'healing.' From being shamed, being teased. Not 'cured' from polio."

Walhydra stares ahead.

Crippled Wolf whispers in her ear, "That's what Jesus did, by the way. He healed people."

"Oh."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Oh. Um...yeah....

Goddess has been tapping Walhydra on the shoulder for several months now, saying *ahem, ahem* in her sweetest pretend-polite little voice.

Finally she has conked Walhydra on the head—in the friendliest way possible, of course.

"Um, Dear. You need to read this blog post."

The post to which Goddess refers is "The Dark," by Cat Chapin-Bishop, on the the blog she shares with her husband Peter Bishop, Quaker Pagan Reflections.

Cat writes:

It's dark, my friends. Yule is almost here, and the wheel is still turning....

Without the moon, the Dark is all there is.

Now, that's not a bad thing. Frightening to us sometimes, because we know Dark (we moderns) no better than we know Moon....

But, you know, you can walk a trail in the woods in the dark—in the full dark, the real dark, the dark without the moon—if your feet are wise, and if you know your way.

And you can deal with the dark, the growing dark, the Midwinter Dark, as our ancestors did, once upon a time.

How did our ancestors live, back in the days before electricity banished the darkness?...

Peter had read somewhere...a study of some group of humans...who lived communally, in a world without artificial light beyond firelight and the moon. And those who studied them noted how they dealt with the dark time of the year.

They slept. A lot.

Moderns are mainly sleep deprived. We nap, or sleep in for long hours when we vacation, but mainly, we do without. Unimaginable, then that entire groups of people would curl up and go to sleep when the sun's light fails. That, by five or six on a winter's night, whole families are at rest...and will stay so until six thirty or seven the next morning.

Except they don't. Sleep is different, it turns out, when it is not artificially staved off by lamplight, but allowed to run the full length of a winter's night. At times, it was more like a light doze, or a meditative wakefulness. And then, with little to divide it from waking, sleep would return again. People roamed in and out of dreams and waking several times each night. There was a different quality to it, not just a different quantity....

Cat then describes the experiment she and Peter did some years ago:

[To] the extent that we could, we decided to set aside the time between Yule and Imbolc--February 2nd--for the Dark. We would use no electric light, no computers, no television, no telephone except for emergencies, and no radio for that time. Oh, at work we would use such things, as we had need.... But to the extent we could, we did without them....

Whether it was the dimmer lighting, the quiet of a life without email and television, or simply ceasing the struggle against the Dark, we found ourselves aware of our sleepiness. We might not have gone to bed at seven, but we often were asleep by eight or nine.

It was good. The nights were soft, and the Dark was gentle.

And when, by Imbolc, the days were lengthening and the nights were growing shorter once again, we felt the returning light, in a way that's simply untranslatable unless you have also lived a season with the Dark. Each tiny sign of the return of spring--not the opening of the buds, but the swelling of them; not the disappearance of the snow, but the thinning of it, and the way it reflected the fire of the sunset later every evening--became pronounced.

This is the power of the Dark.

"Oh. Um...yeah...." Walhydra mumbles.

She realizes how much Cat's words speak to her condition.

"Yeah," Goddess murmurs, a little snidely. "I figured you'd notice that. You've not been paying much attention to body and spirit for a long time now."

"I haven't?"

"Um. You've stopped daily tai chi practice. You've stopped sitting meditation. You've stopped your morning prayers and devotional reading. You've stopped riding your bike...."

"Oh."

"You know, Dearest, that I'm all in favor of modern meds, within reason, but I'm beginning to wondering whether your SSRI experiment last November has gradually dulled your natural awareness?"

"Oh."

Now that she considers it, Walhydra realizes that she has gradually fallen out of the habit of all those deep self-care practices she was doing at the height of her grief-induced despair and anxiety last winter.

She didn't quit them as soon as she started to feel real again in February, when the meds had finally gotten her brain back to a healthy level of serotonin.

And it's not that she's stopped believing in the Divinely Real upon which those practices kept her focused.

But she sees in retrospect how, gradually, beneath conscious awareness, she has increasingly cut corners on herself..."because I'm too busy...because I've got to get to work...because I'm too tired...," etc., etc., etc.

On the other hand, since Fall Equinox, Walhydra has noticed Hubby Jim getting more and more cuddly at night and in the morning—and chosen to stay with him, rather than get up "on time."

It's so sweet, so full of good vibes, to stay huddled together under the covers. Playing spoons. Feeling the weight of the two cats, Sonic and Shadow, as they cuddle up...or bounce around wanting breakfast.

This exchange of cozy snoozefulness has increased as the days have gotten shorter. On non-work mornings, Walhydra lies in bed with JimJim for hours. Waking, deciding not to do tai chi, fading into sleep, waking....

About a decade ago, Walhydra realized that she no longer delights in fall and winter the way she used to. It took a few rounds of so-called "seasonal affective disorder" before she recognized that the shortening days definitely get her down.

At this time of year when everybody is "supposed to" be getting excited about the holidays, getting busier at work and at home, planning for family and parties and gifts and cards and....

Oy, veh!

At this time of year, Walhydra feels less than ever like being sociable and pretending to be nice to people (not a good thing for a public librarian). What she wants to do is hide out, eat, read and go to bed early.

A few years back she finally came up with a slogan for this, based on the same sort of anthropological and evolutionary biological studies Cat refers to:

"Between Samhain and Imbolc, our mammalian brainstems are trying to tell us to put on a layer of fat and hybernate until spring."

*sigh*

Goddess nods her head. "You see? I told you. Even though you know all this stuff, you haven't been paying attention to it. Again."

"Grrr...."

"Oh, don't grrr at me. You know I'm not into guilt-tripping. Just a friendly conk on the head."

Walhydra smiles reluctantly.

"Now, be a good girl and say 'Thank you' to Cat."

Thank you, Dearest Cat. Thank you for speaking in this great, unending, Meeting for Worship in cyberspace.

Love to you.

And to all the gentle readers.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Walhydra's birthday present

In her better moments...perhaps during a well-aspected September Moon in Gemini before a Leap Year—if she squints hard enough... Walhydra is amused at her own Virgoan thoroughness at "doing things that are good for her."

"I'm not obsessive," she snaps compulsively, before hubby Jim can say anything. "I don't do anything I don't enjoy...well, not for long...if I can rationalize quitting it...for something better...um.... What was I saying?"

Jim observes the safety of silence and makes goo-goo eyes at Walhydra as she wheels her new birthday present toward the front door. "See you in a few minutes, Lance," he giggles.

*Hmmph!*

Yes. A week ago, in honor of her fifty-s-s-s-seventh birthday, Walhydra bought herself a new bicycle.

Now, the gentle reader must remember that Walhydra is a preacher's kid son of Depression-era preacher's and farmer's kids—and a Swiss-German Lutheran Quaker to boot.

So...in the midst of her daily frugality (not counting sushi and Thai dinners out with hubby), any time she actually springs for a toy, it must not only be "useful" but also of "high quality," "built to last," and all those other obsolete consumer values of the pre-credit card, pre-throw away 1950s, when Walhydra first learned to shop.

A year and a half ago, trying to improve her health, Walhydra was getting more than usually frustrated with the lack of cooperation evinced by her daily schedule.

(Virgos are good at blaming clocks and calendars for not expanding and contracting time as needed.)

"What's the point," she announced, "of paying the YMCA $52 a month, when I can't get there three times every week to work out?!"

She knew she actually felt better any time managed to get to the Y. She tried evenings right after work...but each evening ended at a different time. She tried going at 6:30 AM, which felt not only wonderful physically but also virtuous in the extreme.

But, really, now! 6:30 AM?!!

This was around the time Walhydra finally joined the local Taoist Tai Chi class every Tuesday evening. Much better than self-imposed, sporadic yoga, or the stationary bike and weight machines, and more sociable.

Walhydra has spent most of her life leaning slightly to the right due to non-paralytic childhood polio, so it's been a delight to experience the restorative effects of this limbering, strengthening form of movement.

It's a new practice which—when she's not too lazy or depressed in the morning to get up at 6 AM...here we go again...crawl onto her witchy sun porch and do it—actually makes her feel happier and taller and straighter.

(Well...maybe not "straighter." More erect...oops! Um, being reincarnated in a gay male, would-be, etc., does mess with the vernacular.)

But for a year she kept on paying the Y, and she kept hearing her body say, "I need more exercise."

Until recently.

A few months back she started asking questions of the two guy librarians at Main Library who bike, one of whom rides to work from her own neighborhood. Aha!

They advised her kindly (without teasing an ignorant old guy who wants to start out) about what kind of bike to get, and they steered her toward a trustworthy local dealer.

Frugal, dark Lutheran, witchy Quaker that she is, Walhydra determined that this would be her birthday present to herself.

(Last year it was a new computer...to replace the almost ten-year-old, oil-burning Pentium II with the Millennium Edition OS—which had defragged its own reboot routine into the memory bin a year earlier.)

She planned the shopping trip for her Thursday off, the week before her birthday and headed for OpenRoad Bicycles. She got stage fright when the guy proposed a test ride, pretending she needed to think about it.

(Well, after all, she hasn't ridden a bike for maybe 30 years and is no judge of technology she hasn't yet used.)

But eventually the sheer hi-tech blackness of the toy enticed her to try it.

"Mikey likes it!" she realized after only a block or two.

So....

Here is this expensive, "aggressive all-terrain bike" (from the promo literature), sitting in the alcove off the living room where the kittens can sniff at it.


And here is Walhydra, struggling out the door in her bike helmet.

She came back a few hours ago, proud that after just one week she can make it the whole mile (on flat streets) to Five Points and back again, almost without running out of breath.

"Well...it's another practice," she says.

Then Walhydra realizes that she's been using this word "practice" a lot recently.

Taoist Tai Chi practice. Sitting meditation practice. Quaker faith and practice.

Hmm.... Is this a clue or something?

Back during her grade school years, Walhydra used to practice piano between weekly lessons. It was very frustrating. Walhydra wanted play pieces, not to practice.

During those early years of practicing scales and chords, it seemed to her like an uninteresting assignment in school: memorize these and play them back to the teacher.

Only years later, long after she had given up on piano, she watched a bass guitarist friend practicing...and it hit her:

"Oh, that's what practicing was for. So I could find those notes and strings and groups of notes without looking or thinking about it. Why didn't anyone tell me?"

Sometimes now Walhydra thinks maybe she actually should believe in reincarnation... except that it would be nice to be able to remember what you learned the last time around before you were already in your 50s and on your way down hill.

But, anyway, at least now she realizes that her drive is slowing down to a more comfortable pace. And that she is...um...a teeny, tiny bit more patient with herself.

"Don't raise your hairy eyebrows!" she says sideways to hubby Jim, in case he's reading this.

And she finds that the inch by inch progress of practicing feels much more attainable and more rewarding than the disappointment that Virgo high standards and scrupulousness can sometimes create.

And so...

"If I can just get myself up around 5:30 every morning to do Tai Chi and then ride...."

Happy Birthday, and

Blessèd Be.

Walhydra's first "senior meal"

Walhydra knows that there is a dark side to that latest story about her mother, Senior Witch.

"I thought that was the dark side," the gentle reader might be wondering.

"Well, yeah," a somewhat subdued Walhydra replies. "It wasn't the cheeriest of tales, was it then?"

She glances around awkwardly.

"But you see, Mom put her finger right on the sore spot. Remember what she said?

" 'For years I've been telling myself I was going to die perfectly healthy.' "

Walhydra isn't laughing.

This week Walhydra read straight through a weirdly brilliant "young adult" novel called I Am the Messenger, by award-winning Australian thirty-year-old Marcus Zusak. She recognized him from the very first pages as one of those youngsters who is "wise beyond his years."

Granted, going all the way back to childhood, a now rather envious Walhydra has liked to think of herself as "wise beyond her years." Unfortunately, since she never liked to be caught out speaking in error, she mostly kept it to herself—unlike this young genius. Now she suspects her years are beyond her wisdom.

In any event, at a pivotal moment in Zusak's novel, his first person narrator Ed says the following:

It's impeccable how brutal the truth can be at times. You can only admire it.

Usually, we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay," we say. "I'm all right." But sometimes the truth arrives on you, and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer—it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

I get to my feet and join [my friend] Ritchie in the river.

We both stand there, knee-deep in water, and the truth has well and truly pulled our pants down.

The river rushes by. (304)

Walhydra has had her own pants down for much of this same week. Unproductively, so to speak.

As part of her diligent Virgo program of "dying perfectly healthy," a year ago she joined the local taoist tai chi class. It's actually made noteworthy difference to her in terms of limbering up her posture and unkinking fifty-mumble years' worth of asymmetrically stored psychosomatic stress.

Joking aside, she seriously recommends this practice.

Nonetheless, it doesn't make incarnate the Virgo fantasy of returning an old body to its unblemished and divine wholeness. Darn.

Instead, what the practice does do is to give one a template towards which to aspire.

What delights and fascinates Walhydra is this. This far along with her practice it will happen that, at any given moment, walking, standing, sitting, driving, her body will notice miniscule misalignments—a left shoulder slightly raised, a right psoas muscle failing to release enough to square her hips—and will make the correction as best as the ancient nerves and muscles can.

"Ancient?!" Walhydra objects, seizing the fountain pen from the hand of her amanuensis. "Just write what I tell you. Don't editorialize!"

The point is that tai chi is slowly restoring a bone-deep body sense which Walhydra has known only sporadically since her bout with non-paralytic polio at age four. This gives her hope.

But about that dark side.

Two Saturday's ago, Walhydra joined her class for a day-long intensive workshop. Despite the sound of that word "intensive," it was a pleasant day of gentle, deep-muscle workout and friendly socializing—until it was followed by a long night of aching, groaning, upset stomach and cramping bowels.

"Oh," Walhydra said in the pre-dawn darkness. "That's right. This is Chinese 'alternative medicine' exercise, releasing old toxins into the blood stream. I need to hydrate!"

Four days of hydrating later, four days of unproductive pants-dropping—despite doses of the liquid chalk some wag cleverly misnamed milk of magnesia—and Walhydra is saying, "Somethin' ain't right!"

She makes a doctor's appointment for Friday.

On Thursday night, Walhydra and hubby Jim are out for dinner with four of their fifty-something gay bowling league buddies. And they're all joking about it!

When she heads for the men's room at one point, Walhydra taps the guy next to her and says, "It's not the emergency you feared sitting in the way of. More likely just wishful thinking."

Upon her return—unproductive again—she asks her fellow geezers, "Did any of you think in your 20s that you'd be joking about stuff like this in your 50s?"

All shake their heads no, sobered by this strange, privileged camaraderie of having lived longer than most of the human race and yet still being prosperous and active.

Privately, Walhydra's Pagan buddy in the group says, "I wonder if it's all the grief and sh-t about your Mom that you're not yet able to let go of?"

Walhydra nods. "I've thought of that. It's bound to be part of what's going on."

But it's not only grief and sh-t about Senior Witch. Walhydra can't keep denying that she is older, too.

Yeah, tai chi is loosening things up for her—well, some things. Yet when she watches the progression of her Mom's failing memory, she's also aware of her own. And the doctor has been warning her about her not-yet-diabetic-but-rising blood sugar level. And the dentist wants her to cap the forty-year-old filled molar and the yellowed, root-canalled eye tooth.

For decades, Walhydra has been secretly delighted that people routinely mistake her from at least ten years younger than she is. During her prison counselor years she used to joke that she grew the goatee "because that's the only place I get gray hairs—and I've earned them."

But, as the Chiffon commercial used to say....

When Walhydra was making one of her recent lone trips to South Carolina, before Senior Witch moved to Pensacola, she stopped near Savannah for a pancake lunch. Browsing the menu, she realized she wasn't really up to eating five pancakes. Then she turned to the back page.

"Perkin's '55 Plus'!" it read. Three pancakes for the senior citizens' price.

"Hmm...," she thought bemusedly. And, like the baby bear's—or maybe grampa bear's—portion, it was just right.

Hmm....

On Friday, the physician's assistant finds nothing of concern in her physical exam of Walhydra's cramped up abdomen. An x-ray to rule out blockages finds nothing either. So the P.A. says to up the water and "milk" and fiber-rich foods...and wait.

That night things are—*phew!*--more productive.

At work on Saturday, Walhydra jokes with a soon-to-retire crony.

"By this age, I've learned to just laugh at my own psychosomatic ailments, instead of worrying about them," she says. "So I had to get the doctor's permission to start sh-tting again. Oh, well. It's silly, but it's a lot easier and quicker than psychoanalysis."

By this age?

Here, then, is the dark side. Trying to keep Senior Witch from aging and dying comes out of genuine fear of her loss. But someone else doesn't want to age or die either—despite her sometime enlightenment.

"If I could just eat the right diet, do this tai chi faithfully, get serious about cardiovascular workouts at the Y...."

Every once in a while, in the midst of her holier-than-thou rants, Walhydra acknowledges being a product of her culture's fears and fantasies, a mortal like all other mortals.

As she sat in Perkins eating that third pancake a couple months back, she thought about her chronic "fifty-mumble" joke. Then she tried out a different line, just to see what it would feel like.

"I'm almost sixty."

Hmm....