The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

You learn that a man you have only ever seen at the post office has a bad shoulder and will carry 25s anyway, one at a time, and switch hands at every corner.

And you learn who walks past the hardware store, and who stops to look in the window.

Every single trip, we passed it.

There was no other way to go. My old room was right beside it, and the feed store was down the same side of the street. So every person carrying something of mine walked right past my uncle’s front window, coming and going, again and again.

I watched it happen without meaning to.

Half of the people carrying my iron had bought their fence staples and furnace filters at that counter for twenty years.

Not one of them said a word at that window.

Nobody pointed. Nobody shouted. Nobody stood out front and called my uncle a name. It is not the way people are out here.

They just walked past. With a plate in each hand, or a bar on a shoulder, or a box of kettlebells between two of them. Past the window, past the door, past the little bell. Back and forth.

Once, about halfway through, I saw my uncle come up to the glass and stand there with his hands in his apron. I was carrying a plate. I looked at him and nodded the way you nod at somebody across a church parking lot.

He did not nod back. He went back behind his counter.

Now I have to tell you about Ingeborg, because she is the part people cry about, and I am one of them.

When everybody started carrying, I went over to her at her car. She was standing at the curb in her good wool coat and her gym shoes, holding her purse in front of her with both hands.

“You sit,” I said. “Sit in your car and keep warm. You can come down when we’re set up.”

“No,” Ingeborg said.

“Ingeborg.”

“I have come here three days a week for three years,” she said. “I will not sit in my car.”

So I gave her the lightest thing I could find. It was one of the 10-pound plates, black iron, with a little chip on the edge where somebody had dropped it on the concrete the first week, before I had the mats.

She took it in both hands, out in front of her, the way you carry a pie dish to a funeral dinner. She held it against her coat buttons. And she started walking.

She did not walk fast. Three blocks is a long way when you are eighty and two years out from a new knee. She stopped twice, once at each corner, and rested with the plate against the top of a fire hydrant, and then picked it up again.

Arvid passed her four times going back and forth. Every time he slowed down and said, “You want me to take that, Mrs. Lund?”

And every time she said, “No, thank you, Arvid. I have it.”

Somewhere around the second corner I heard her humming. It was “Children of the Heavenly Father,” the old Swedish one, the hymn they sing at every baptism at our church. She hummed it under her breath the way my grandmother used to over the dishes, not for anybody, just to keep time.

I walked behind her for the last block. I did not offer to carry it. I just walked behind her with my own plate, so she would know somebody was there.