Thursday, August 12, 2004

214 stairs

There are 214 stairs down the cliff to my mom's house. They're made of rough lumber and braces, rebuilt every 15 years or so by the men on the beach. Each time they get better. This time they're all the same height.

Some soul numbered the steps in black marker, starting at the bottom: 10, 20, 30. Yesterday I did the stairs four times. That's 1,712 stairs.

My brother, a longliner-fisherman/ship's-pilot-turned-haz-mat-cleanup-guy who works outdoors, gazed at me while I typed. "You need to jog, not blog," he said. For incentive, he brought out two photos of us in bathing suits in Arizona, when I was 23 and he was 20. Back then, he was training for javelin (won the nationals twice), and I was playing ice hockey 4 nights a week in a men's league. "We look exactly alike here, Rachel."

"Wow, look at your six-pack," I said. "Wow, look at MINE."

Then he brought out a National Geographic, opened to a full-color anatomy diagram showing a healthy woman -- red sinewy meat -- and a fat one, who looked like the bacon you don't buy because it's too much white.

My brother is a man of few words.

I decided to do 4 roundtrip stair-sets a day while I'm down here. I just did my four for today.

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