You Cannot Steal Our Mind Photos

My six year old granddaughter says sweet things. When she sees me walking slowly up her townhouse stairs when we visit there, she and her brother, age eight, wait patiently for me to ascend them and they say “yeah, Grammie.” I feel yeah when I make them, they are high for an old senior with aching knees. I do it and I feel victorious. Sometimes, going up is easier than going down. I feel that way about my new outside wooden steps, all pretty and white and expensive, as I descend them to go somewhere.

We seniors cannot give up exercising, walking, thinking and doing. In the older days, when one had infirmities, they were considered powerless and confined to their home. Now we are all walking, using our stationary bikes and trying to be active.

I had a heart checkup recently and the cardiologist told me he is so proud of me for being mentally active with writing my articles and mainly for doing three miles every day on my bike. He said not only is it excellent for heart and knees but, also, for my cholesterol HDL which is extremely excellent. My HDL was always great in the number, even when the regular cholesterol was too high many years ago. However, the HDL is even higher now which is wonderful and total cholesterol you want not to be high. He credits that rise in the number with doing the exercise bike daily.

I remember when Mom had her first and only heart attack at age forty-eight in 1955, she was told not to do this or not to try that. She actually stayed home most of the time and did very little active things. These were the orders.

Of course times have changed and we are more active. In my young days, the only time you saw people walking was to go to the grocery store, to the doctor who was in the neighborhood, to the pharmacy or to the movies. No one walked for just exercise. They walked out of necessity to obtain food, drugs, medical assistance or entertainment. Very few actually did it for exercise. Very few even owned autos in those days.

My aunt in New York City bought an exercise bike and kept it in her bedroom. When we visited there, we were astonished, that a regular person had a stationary bike in their home. She was blind and the doctor told her to use it for some exercise, since she could not walk around the neighborhood for it. She got on the bike and we were amazed at her using it, because we had only seen pictures of bikes in ads for health studios or physical therapy places. This was in 1949.

Then when I was about twenty-three in 1957, my girlfriend and I joined a health studio in the neighborhood and after work, we would meet and go on the bikes only, similar to the one seen in Aunt Ruth’s home in New York City. We thought ourselves real swinging young women who were trying to slim down our thighs. I also went to one out in Towson called Slenderella. This was a play on the word Cinderella. We had fun there, though they wanted to massage you too and we only wanted to use their bike equipment. We kind of were ahead of our time way back then.

When I was newly married, there was a couple living next door to us in the apartment complex, named Mimi and Don. Don was the manager of a health studio out in Towson somewhere and he told me once that health would be a big time business opportunity and that he would be rich someday from being ahead of his own time working at a job like this. He worked long hours because the majority of his clients came in to exercise after work and so the evening hours up until midnight were the busiest. The daytime hours were slim (pun intended) with clients, other than a few business men on their lunch hours. This was in 1961.

Pictures can be worth a thousand words and looking nice in a picture can be derived by exercising one’s body. Exercise can be worth according to my fine cardiologist Dr. Charles C. Cummings, a lifetime of happier days mentally and more productive days and hours as we age. He said that exercise too is good for the mind and he is so proud of me for accomplishing it.

So to the guys that pickpocketed my husband and took his beloved photos and probably tore them up since they had no use for them; we are sad and sorry you took his wallet, his credit cards and also pictures of his younger days. You, however, did not take away his spirit or his remembrances of those early times. They will always be in his mind and as Dad looked so young and cute in his bathing suit, I remember him from those photos and also from my mind’s photo album and so does my husband remember those dear times of his lost photos.

You cannot steal these from his mind and nor did you gain anything but being a thief. If a thief has a decent mind, he will be sorry he took away not only someone’s credit cards and used them; he will be remorseful of stealing someone’s memories. However, we are strong in our minds and we will always remember ‘mind photos’ of those happy times. You cannot take that from us.