What the hell brought you to the Y today?
The first encounter I had with the "twins" was early last spring. The two women looked somewhere between 40 and 50 years old and they were identical twins. The same round figure, moon face palmed by thin, dark hair, sloped shoulders, arms hanging by their sides. Both women seemed to have dressed with neither regard to their appearance nor their activity for the day. Polyester slacks, panty hoes, grasshopper type shoes, one in a Travis Tritt shirt with a lacy cardigan on top, the other with a large, spotty sweatshirt. The two of them were on tread mills side by side. Neither of them were going more than 2 mph, and the slow pace seemed to match up with their natural gaits. One disappeared and returned with a bag of Fritos and a Mountain Dew. She returned to the tread mill, snacking through the remaining quarter mile. It had never occurred to me to eat on a tread mill, but there are television sets everywhere and I completely understand the merit of snacking while watching TV.
The twins didn't return for some time. The next time was in August during a really hot week. They found their places a couple rows in front of me and set their bags down beside the tread mills. One had a fountain drink in a Pilot Travel center cup. Once I saw a woman drinking a huge frappuccino-looking drink from Starbucks while using the elliptical machine, complete with whipped cream, so the fountain drink didn't strike me as too strange. Her sister was wearing a pair of cut off sweat pants that seemed to flair out from the hip, and a white v neck undershirt. They were both well into their snail's pace walks when I noticed the one wearing sweat pants was holding an unlit cigarette.
The downtown YMCA is great for a number of reasons. My favorite reason is that the workout room overlooks the major intersection of Henley Street and Clinch Ave, right across the street form the Sunsphere and World's Fair Park. A steady stream of foot and vehicle traffic files through the concrete corridor and there's always something interesting to witness. Yesterday I was using one of the resistance machines close to the window so I could see the parking area and sidewalk. A man crossed the south intersection of clinch, then continued traveling north on the Henley Street sidewalk, stopping periodically to examine the ground. As he approached the area immediately in front of the resistance machines I saw him stop and stoop to his knee. He picked up a few cigarette buts from the ground, pulled a plastic sandwich baggie from his breast pocket, put two inside the baggie, and after rolling the other between his fingers a few times he lit it and continued on his way. I was on the phone with my mom the entire time and gave her a play by play. I had been there the Saturday prior and that parking area was being used for tailgating purposes, so I suppose it would be a good scavenging spot.
There's plenty of other amazing things to see at the downtown Y. A large, musclebound man putting a dip of tobacco in before lifting 400 pounds, a pre-teen walking into the cardio room in short shorts and a string bikini top, a farmer in overalls and muddy boots doing curls with three pound weights, a downtown lawyer cussing her daughter out on the phone after hearing of her latest speeding ticket, two businessmen playing a heated game of ping pong that ended with an injury, a woman with the sweetest helper dog I've ever seen that sits patently beside her elliptical machine till she's done, an 87 year old man who can outlast most of the 20 year olds... It is an amazing place full of wonderful and interesting people. I hope the YMCA in Champaign Illinois is half as awesome as the downtown Knoxville location.
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