Losing It

The other evening I'm driving my daughter home from gym, she asks if I was alive when the Titanic went down.

The girl has no sense of time. Or timing. I nearly sideswiped a 14-foot U-haul in the next lane, its side panel festooned with scenes of the Southwest. I started thinking about cacti.

My daughter seemed sincere enough in the question, sucking down an endless rope of red licorice, eyes glazed after 45 minutes of giants on the high bar. She got her giants back last week. Now she's lost her back handspring on beam.

In gymnastics, it's not uncommon to lose skills, then get them back again. My daughter has lost her back handspring a number of times. The worst is when a girl loses a skill in the middle of a meet. You want to holler "Stop the presses, for crissakes!" and run out onto the floor and start looking for it. Thank the gods this has never happened to us. Although after one particularly low score on floor during the State Meet (one of those judges is a fat fucking nazi, everybody fucking knows this), my daughter lost her dimple. An arguably useful skill in gymnastics, as in life. She didn't get it back for over a week.

Until my daughter discovered a passion for courting death and dismemberment while flipping in ever-increasing complexity through the ethers, I was gymnastics-challenged. Oh, I knew the headliners -- Olga, Cathy, Nadia, Mary Lou -- and the events -- floor, beam, bars, vault. And I knew the Holy Grail they all sought, the elusive "10." But other than this Olympic fair-weather interest, I was clueless. I didn't know jack. Make that jill. I didn't know a rip from a hole in the ground. As in, what do you think of when you hear the word "rip"? Most likely a jagged bloody hole in the center of your daughter's palm caused by constant chafing of her grips isn't on your short list. Now that I think of it, a rather stigmata-esque wound, but...

I digress. If anyone slogging through this blathering rag is in the least interested in learning more about this not-for-the-faint-of-heart sport (as they say around the chalk barrel, "If gymnastics were easier, they'd call it football"), head on down to your friendly neighborhood video store and rent the narratively-weak but quasi-realistic film "Stick It." Which is what the girls say when they land a particularly difficult skill.

As in, last month my daughter was sticking her backhand on beam. Now she's lost it. Again.

Speaking of the short list. Things I've lost: money, friends, face, my way, that vintage Forties gabardine suit jacket I gave to some Guggenheim-endowed broad I never saw again. Things I've lost recently: perspective, skin tone, facility on the uptake, ground.

I don't know, maybe it's the Age Thang, but I've lost my reserve, too. It's depleted. Nada. Gone off the reservation. Like that Titanic crack? In the car the other night? I started weeping. Silently, but copiously. Which made it even more fucking difficult to see the road. Add that to the list: I've lost my night vision.

I've lost my waistline. My ability to draw the line. My ability to toe the line. My talent for one-liners. There's a fine line between my current M.O. and early stage alzheimers. Knock on wood, it runs in the family. Although nobody ever copped to it. But my grandmother, bless her little thrice-divorced soul, spent her last days rolling through the corridors of the nursing home in her wheelchair, smiling beatifically and giving the other inmates the "queen wave." As opposed to the finger, something I'd be inclined to do. Apparently she thought she was a float in a parade. Or afloat. Whichever, there are worse ways to bow out. So to speak.

Lately it appears I've also been losing the ability to speak (that voice in the background is my husband muttering, "This is a problem?"). I do all right with dogs and preschoolers (everyone knows cats have no talent for languages), it's adults who render me speechless. Not to mention adolescents, who simply render me. Like meat. Maybe I'm taking my cue from Mister Ed, who wouldn't say a thing unless he had something to say. A noble enough philosophy.

Except, I do have something to say. Ask anyone who knows me, or who's willing to cop to it. And if not? They can just stick it. I've been pretty much trying to say what I have to say since I uttered my first words. Which, according to my daughter, were something along the lines of "Ooooo! Wa-Wa!", burbled delightedly as the lifeboat was lowered into the icy waters of the North Atlantic while the band played on.