The Gym Is Wanting

Outside is the Cyberport courtyard where I used to take my kids to play twelve years ago.  Most hotel breakfast spreads are predictable but this Le Meridien layout down here in Pok Fu Lam is worthy of mention.  Up at the salad bar, I linger by the fruit and the cheese and consider the muscular thighs of a young woman in demanding red shoes, standing there, befuddled by her cereal choices.  The call I came early for is done and I still have time for the gym before we need to set off today.  

And where the breakfast at this hotel is fabulous, the gym is wanting.  It’s tucked in a corner of the same floor as the dining room, with only enough room for a half a dozen machines.  I look in vain for the station that would allow me to pull weights down and pull weights up, like I do at the phenomenal international school gym back up in Beijing.   The stair master is different.  You need to press buttons more than once, push on things iteratively and force the step down to get it to go.  I keep pressing to remove the talking head from the stairmaster screen in front of me. 

Up on the wall some fifteen feet before me are multiple television screens.  Some have on CNN.  Anderson Cooper, serious, squinting as always, is getting answers from someone I don’t care about.  Hong Kong news has people in handcuffs with hoods on their head shuffling into a building.  We cut to a solitary brunette standing by a touch screen.  She pulls up a road accident for our consideration.  Things keeps zooming in and zooming out calling for attention.  I do my best to block out theses two-minute-hate screens.  Diana Ross and the Supremes help.

The classic from the year of my birth, “Keep Me Hanging On” has announced itself up in my ears.  It sounds so urgent and immediate.  It’s all I can do to not call out “oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh,” when they arise in the second verse.   There’s a small woman tucked into a space behind me stretching on a yoga mat.  Fortunately I’ve noticed she’s there.  Otherwise I’d make an utter fool of myself, when Diana says: “And there ain’t nothing I can do about it," were I to accompany with silent finger shake.  

Friday 4/06/18