Saving one another, quietly

ou would never think it to look at me now, but I used to play a lot of tennis,” George said. He was having pancakes at our weekly breakfast with two other friends at the Shalimar Diner in Rego Park, Queens.

George paused to look out the window. He had recently retired as a software engineer for a major corporation, but now, in his early 60s, freelanced out of his house as a consultant. “I’d really like to get back in shape.”

“You should,” I said. should.”

But I knew it would be hard. George had recently lost his longtime wife to an eightyear bout with cancer. He then gorged himself nightly out of grief. Within a year or two, he gained roughly 100 pounds and his doctor diagnosed him as dangerously prediabetic.

I suggested he and I take walks together around the neighborhood, just to get him moving again, and the next day, off we went. Soon we scheduled weekly walks through local parks and around town.

I had tried playing physical therapist decades earlier. My father had excelled as a boy in playing baseball and football, and then as a young man even boxed in the Golden Gloves.

But after marriage and two children, he “You definitely became a workaholic. He ate too much, often late at night, and grew sedentary and severely overweight. For years I begged him to take better care of himself and get active again.

One fall day in 1969, as I prepared to train as a miler for my high school track team, I persuaded my father, then still only in his early 40s, to go for a practice run around the block with me.

He lumbered along laboriously for 100 yards or so, breathing hard. Then he stopped. He bent over, his hands on his knees, his face red. And that turned out to be that.

For the rest of his life, I pleaded with my father to get some exercise, even if only a walk now and then, and to try to eat smarter.

He always said he would, but he never did. And in time, he packed on still more pounds, walked with increasing difficulty and developed high blood pressure. Come age 70, a massive heart attack finally got the best of him.

Maybe George would fare better. Week after week we took our walks, and then month after month. Every few hundred yards or so he would feel the need to stop to sit and take a breather. But then, on he plodded.

“That felt good,” he told me after each outing. “I’m getting there.” And then he would thank me for getting him out back into circulation.

I once spent half a day observing an occupational therapist in action at NYU Langone Medical Center. She ministered to patients stricken with muscular disorders and recovering from stroke and injuries incurred in crippling accidents. With the most tender precision she guided her patients through sessions designed to restore some measure of the basic function and mobility we all tend blithely to take for granted.

Those patients relearned, inch by hardfought inch, how to grasp an object, get up from a chair and walk. At one point, I saw her hoist a seated patient upright. They briefly went chest to chest, hip to hip, as if dancing together.

Now, without any claim to expertise, I sought to do likewise with my friend George, who had not been hit by a car or stricken by a sudden malady, but merely let himself go over the years.

Maybe I saw my father in George. Maybe in going for those walks with him, I was answering a calling, again trying to save my dad.

In the 20 years since my father died, I’ve established, purely by serendipity, a kind of sideline as an ad hoc, amateur, self-appointed rehab specialist.

For example, I play tennis once a week with three friends who happen to be in need of regular therapy. One blew out his knee delivering packages for UPS, requiring ACL surgery. Another experienced an aneurysm that forced him to retire in his 40s. And the other has Parkinson’s disease.

Maybe all of us occasionally feel the impulse to play therapist. Maybe in the course of rehabilitating others, we discover that we’re also somehow rehabbing ourselves. One recent afternoon, I came across a familiar figure on the tennis courts. It was George. He was back to playing tennis, and he looked like he had even dropped a few pounds. We exchanged cheery hellos. “Look at you,” I said. “Yes,” George said, raising his arms out to his sides. “Look at me.”