When I looked into the mirror a minute ago and saw my poor old face, I didn’t think about me. Me, the graying man looking out at me, the unshaven man looking in. I saw, instead, a memory from grade school gym class.
Who knows why our minds leap about and flip sides as they do? We are fickle and generally unruly in our thinking. So, my mind jumped back through all the years as I looked into the mirror.
There we stood in white tee shirts and red shorts on the gymnasium floor—sixth-grade boys with pitchy voices and aching muscles. We stood in line, bathed in bright light, awaiting our turn at the pull-up bar fastened to the wall above the polished hardwood deck. Each of us was expected to jump up, grasp the bar, execute ten clean pull-ups, drop down, and let the next kid take a turn.
One by one, gangly boys flung themselves at the bar and ten-counted. Pretty soon one of the obese kids stepped up to the bar. He just barely managed to jump up and hang from the bar. His gym shorts were as wide as a stuffed chair. And he just draped there for a long, long time, trying to pull his face to the bar. Up halfway on the first attempt. Up one quarter the distance on the second. Up only a little on the third. Then just hanging there, embarrassed.
We all knew that he would never pull a single one. He never did.
So, I looked in the mirror, remembering that. Reliving that time until a single tear escaped the corner of my eye.
I really liked that kid.
--Mitchell Hegman
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